KDE Commit-Digest for 30th December 2007

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Furious last-minute application of polish across the board in preparation for the tagging of KDE 4.0 Final next week. Work towards threading GDB operations support in KDevelop. Support for media players employing the MPRIS standard in the Plasma "Now Playing" data engine, with the import of a Flickr Plasmoid. A style manager, support for Karbon gradients and lots of colourspace work in Krita. Various improvements in the Eigen2 math vector library. Continued progress in the KBugBuster rewrite. Revived support for .tar, .tar.gz, and .tar.bz2 files in Ark. More work on KCabinet, a library to support the MS Cabinet format. A printing framework in Okteta. System Settings moves from a custom view to Dolphin's KCategorizedView. Finishing touches in the Oxygen widget style and colour schemes. Work from the "newssl" branch is moved back into kdelibs. Various unfinished features hidden in Konsole for KDE 4.0. The Trolltech Phonon backends are moved from kdebase to kdereview for KDE 4.0. The unmaintained "regexpeditor" moves from kdeutils to playground/utils. Read the rest of the Digest here.

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Comments

by Bobby (not verified)

A very Happy New Year to you all in the KDE team and thanks very much for your tremendous accomplishment with this project.
I did a KDE4 Suse update last night (German time) and all I can say is that the critics will be getting more silent :) It's obvious that you guys haven't been sleeping much over the Christmas season. I am really happy with the progress.

Last but not least, thank you very much for keeping us up-to-date Danny.

by Max (not verified)

Agree!!!

You guys have been busy. Please keep up the good work. Only a few days left. Please don't skimp now. Only a few more days, then we all can sleep again.

You guys can sleep, cause the product is released and working well.
and we can sleep, because we're not waiting up all night in exitement and anticipation. :p

Happy New Year 2008 to the KDE team and the open source community!!!!

by Dolphin-fanatic :) (not verified)

this post made my smile :)

by YAC {yet anothe... (not verified)

It is unfortunate that you don't seem to actually understand the meaning of the word 'critic'. Since it is basically the same word in German [Kritiker], I presume that it isn't a language issue.

True critics are not mere gripers, they (we) raise issues because we want them to be addressed -- we want the problems fixed. So, our interests are in having KDE succeed. One wonders if the critics are more interested in the success of the project than those that seek to silence critics by attacking the messenger rather than addressing the message.

I am happy to see progress, but I doubt that it will be sufficient to have it ready by the release date.

by Bobby (not verified)

I didn't imply that critics are all negative in my statement. What I said is that they will be more silent.
I have to disappoint you by saying that I do understand what the word means both in English and German. German is actually my second language and I was born and grew up in an English speaking country. I have to admit that my English is not as good as it once was but the basics are still there :)

It's a bit sad that the most people don't see criticism in a positive way, that they can't use it for improvements but that's the way it is unfortunately. However at this point I think that the developers could do with a little less bashing.
There is a thread below about "stinking consistency" which Aaron replied to. He said it's not what the guy said that was a problem but how he said it. And that's the point. The most people who criticise do it aggressively without realising that they are doing more damage than good, making even personal attacks which kills the whole purpose of the criticism and demotivates the one criticized.

I have faith in the KDE team that they will deliver a very stable (though not perfect) and usable desktop by next Friday. They have told us what to expect and I am sure that they will fulfil what they promised.

by reihal (not verified)

I am very impressed by the increasing number of commits from the US of A.
(Still nothing from Ireland)

by Borat Saghdeyev (not verified)

It's "U, S and A" !

by she (not verified)

No, its not.

by debian (not verified)

according to Borat it is ;-)

by NabLa (not verified)

All your base are belong to us.

by Andy Allan (not verified)

My only comment on the map would be to use a colour other than red - it's hardly a "bad thing" that commits are coming from those countries (all work gratefully received etc), and especially with some large-area countries like Russia and Canada it looks like it's a map of Really Bad Things Everywhere :-)

by Danny Allen (not verified)

The "Rainbow" map theme is more about the "temperature" of development - where red means "red hot"! I don't see that as a bad thing. ;)

You can also use the "default" colour theme!

Danny

by Thomas (not verified)

I just compiled from SVN... looks good so far. I know, there has been some work on integrating networkmanager into solid... How do I use it? is there already a GUI frontend available? or do I need to install KDE3 libs and use knetworkmanager for the time being?

by Will Stephenson (not verified)

The Solid/NM stuff is not usable yet. Use KDE3 knetworkmanager for now.

by Diederik van de... (not verified)

Thanks for a simple scanning application!

by asdf (not verified)

does it support scanning to pdf?
or just pixel images?

by Odysseus (not verified)

I´m assuming you will do that through Print to PDF. Planned for KDE4.1, a proper `Export to PDF´ standard action rather than expecting users to know to use Print instead.

John.

by testerus (not verified)

proper `Export to PDF´?
creating PDFs with OCRed text behind the image, that would be *proper* IMHO.

by Magnus Bergmark (not verified)

I don't know if you have noticed, but the RSS feed is somewhat broken.
Each item have a body of "undefined" instead of the real message text. It has been like this for a while.

by Danny Allen (not verified)

The Digest RSS feed works fine for me here with Akregator...

Can you explain more (preferably telling me what needs to be changed code-wise in the feed?)

Thanks,
Danny

by Martin Fitzpatrick (not verified)

I think he means there is no content in the rdf feed. Below is an extract from the feed:

KDE Commit-Digest for 30th December 2007
http://dot.kde.org/1199338440/

You're right that it works in Akregator (does that fetch the content from the URL?), but in other places e.g. Google /ig homepage the feed shows up as only links with no content. That means the only way to read the summary is to come to the dot. No biggie, but unusual.

by Martin Fitzpatrick (not verified)

My mistake, Akregator is using a different feed. It is the dotkdeorg.rdf which is contentless, while the updates.rdf feed contains the content. Hope that helps.

http://commit-digest.org/updates.rdf
http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf

by Matt (not verified)

I believe he is speaking of the Dot's RDF feed. That feed is contentless while the Commit Digest's RSS feed actually shows the main paragraph as content.

by Fred (not verified)

Anybody knows btw why the Dot feed is contentless?

by Anon (not verified)

Although the 4.0 release will likely be rough, it seems there are some people around who are happy to concentrate on all the many, many good things we're seeing, even at this very early stage of the KDE4 cycle:

http://digg.com/linux_unix/10_Things_I_Love_about_KDE_4_RC2

Keep up the good work! And thanks to the people who worked so hard over the Christmas time to get everything banged into shape - a surprisingly high number of commits, considering the season.

by Bobby (not verified)

He did 10 things I hate about KDE4 RC2 last week. It was very interesting but some people weren't happy about it. Anyway the most of those things have now disappeared. I am going to read what he wrote this time.

by Anonymous (not verified)

There is also a long discussion whether to release or not at http://digg.com/linux_unix/KDE_4_0_Reviewer_Reminders

by Bobby (not verified)

The developers know what's best, after all it's not their first desktop release.
What really sick my stomach are people who just look at a few screen shots or read a few blogs about KDE4 and then pass their judgements. There are people who have handed down the most critical judgements without ever using KDE! This is really crazy. And there are those who compare KDE 4 to Vista calling it a beta product on release. There is a world of difference between the both: one is not forced to take a beta product on purchasing a new PC/Laptop like it is in the case of Vista and paying hundreds of dollars in the process. Another thing is that one is not forced to live with that beta product for 5 years as in the case of XP but the same people who are complaining about a 4.0 that's not released yet stop complaining after buying their expensive beta M$ software. Isn't it a crazy world?

by jospoortvliet (not verified)

Indeed!

by Axel (not verified)

Shouldn't that be a piece of dot.kde.org news in itself?

by Darryl Wheatley (not verified)

Thanks Danny for another great Digest and KDE developers for your frenetic work at this turning point in KDE history.

Since the developer mentioned they wanted a "less generic" name for the scanning program than "Glimpse", I propose "KangaScan" since Kooka was an abbreviation of kookaburra, another Australian animal. Kanga is from kangaroo, an indigenous Australian word. Or what about "KoalaScan"? An oxygen icon for either name could look pretty exciting.

I was going to propose DrakScan as an alternative, so the person who proposed Drak for Dragon Player can still see their name make an appearance, :) but after googling it, I see that it's the name of a Mandriva program so it's unavailable :(

Are there other ideas? I guess some people will be wanting a non-English name to reduce the "Anglo-imperialism" in KDE's application names. Kangaroo is not English but an Aboriginal word originally meaning "I don't know" (this is what the Sydney Aborigines said when an Englishman asked them what the animal was called), but is now the name of the cute furry marsupials that are Australia's animal emblem. Still, it would be cool to hear other people's suggestions. Propose a name now, or forever hold your peace! :)

by Marc (not verified)

I like "KangaScan" very much, sounds nice and the oxygen icon could be really cool!

by Hans (not verified)

"KangaScan", that sounds familiar. Am I the only one who thinks of Kangaskhan? Probably. But it's still quite funny: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaskhan

Heh.

by Bobby (not verified)

It really sounds like Kangaskhan but I like the name, especially that it has a K at the beginning keeping the KDE tradition :)

by anonymous (not verified)

What about "Genghi Skan ?"

by Matt (not verified)

Now *that* would have an interesting icon!

by Tom Chandler (not verified)

Actually the Kangaroo was named in Cooktown (Queensland) when Captain Cook's crew were repairing their ship there. The name was derived from the local Aboriginal name for the grey kangaroo.

(As an completely off topic aside: It is technically Cooktown and not Syndey that was the first recorded site of European settlement in Australia- since Captain Cook and his men lived there seven or so weeks in 1770.)

by Darryl Wheatley (not verified)

Oops, I don't want to verse you in a trivia contest :D Shame on me for not verifying my facts (and the "I don't know" meaning is apparently a myth, so my charming frontier tale is falling apart). But thanks for the correct info.

by blueget (not verified)

What about a simple "Skan" or "sKan"?

by Mihas (not verified)

What about Klimpse?

by Pieter Bootsma (not verified)

I was actually happy to see yet another name not being k-ified in it's name. Hell, even one starting with a G ;) I do like Glimpse as a name, and that it is a word used often should not stop you from using it. As long as there is no other (comparable) software with the name, you're fine I would say.

by yman (not verified)

in modern Hebrew a scanner is a sorek.

by Marc Driftmeyer (not verified)

Keep Glimpse. Along with Phonon, Plasma and other non-K names this one works.

by reihal (not verified)

Cornea is much better.
No need for a k.

by KDErocker (not verified)

The new wallpapers are still not commited. Any plans to commit them so we will have a new nice default? I think tagging ist tomorrow so we are running out of time.

by DanaKil (not verified)

Hmm, the previous logout icon was much better imho, the new one looks so XP :-/

http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-12-30/moreinfo/752456/#visual

http://danakil.free.fr/linux/logout.png (XP and KDE)

by Bobby (not verified)

The colour distinction does make a difference. Before logout, restart and shutdown were all black. One had to read the discription but now it's easier with different colours although I think that logout should have a different colour than shutdown.
I disagree that they look like XP's, they are far more beautiful.

by hias (not verified)

I you want to complain about the new logout icon design, the only reason could be because it looks like the one in ubuntu.

I think it looks great and is totally different than the XP logout icon except the color.

BTW is there any change to get another folder icon as option, not default. I'm referring to the one replaced by the current version because people complained it doesn't look like a folder. I use it since months and am addicted to it, in the end its a matter of habit. It would be cool to be able to change it easily because it's part of oxygen, instead of keeping a copy around all the time of KDE4.

by Jakob Petsovits (not verified)

> BTW is there any chance to get another folder icon as option, not default.

I'd say that's not very probable, it would likely require a mechanism to override any theme icons, and that's not particularly easy to do and requires a bit intrusive code changes for a very rare edge case wish.

The better way would be to create a derivative theme that just replaces the "folder" icon and otherwise inherits from Oxygen... but I'm not motivated enough to find links on how this works - I'd say take a good icon theme, look at its index.desktop file and adapt that, throw out most of the icons and insert your favorite folder icon there.

With a little luck, you can have your own personal derivative theme without much effort, plus you don't need to wait for some developer with too much time to implement in-theme icon switching.