KDE Traffic #53 by Russell Miller

A slick KDE Traffic #53 is out. This one features a single long-standing topic, the release cycle of KDE 3.2. Read all about it at the usual location.

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Comments

by nilesh (not verified)

mera number aa gaya :-)

by nilesh (not verified)

Okay .. that meant that finally its my turn ... :-)

by Russell Miller (not verified)

Sorry dude. I got first post, and Juergen got second.

You're number three! You're number three!

:P

by LAWYER KAMAL (not verified)

Ummmmmm

Number one, number two, number three....

This is a cryptographic comunication ...

did someone have the gpg=key?

by PaintedReality (not verified)

If we use the latest qt build, will you need to translate this :-) KDE 3.2 will support hindi as well ... ;-)

by rotary (not verified)

First, thanks Russell Miller.. I really enjoy your writing style in this one.. makes reading so much text a breeze to read..

Second, a quote from the article:

"Stephan Kulow replied that he wants to wait for Nove Hrady because he's not even sure if he'll want to scrap 3.2 and go right to 4.0 (!?!)."

Wow. Isn't release of kde 4.0 conditional of when qt 4.0 comes out? I expect a lot of architecutral changes to occur in kde 4.0, such as scrapping aRts (hopefully!).

A bug count of 2300 is alarming, but briefly looking at bugs.kde.org, it seems that most of them are old konqueror or khtml bugs.. Hmmpph.. can anyone tell me how to get a number?

by Russell Miller (not verified)

You're welcome. Being professional doesn't have to mean being stuffy, that's my take on things. You should have seen me while I was still attending church - I knew exactly which buttons to press to make people very uncomfortable without quite crossing the line. It was quite entertaining. And if you get a chance to visit NW Iowa this summer, I'm accompanying for the local community theater - I also try to put that philosophy into that as well.

Replies to that comment revised the count down to around 1,000 or so. That's still a lot. And since the criteria for judging what a real "bug" is varies from person to person, I don't think that question will be answered satisfactorily for quite a while.

--Russell

by a.c. (not verified)

You should have seen me while I was still attending church - I knew exactly which buttons to press to make people very uncomfortable without quite crossing the line.

And would that be the button to turn on the heater and off the AC in the middle of summer :)

by Russell Miller (not verified)

No, the ministers had already taken care of *that* little detail.

--Russell

by ik (not verified)

btw, i don't think kde is soo arts-dependant, you can do an OK job of configuring an arts-free KDE yourself, with JuK, kmplayer, configuring knotify to do "play foo.wav" instead of playing trough arts, and disabling the startup of artsd at kde startup ...

by epoch (not verified)

You still have to install arts, so KDE is still dependant on it, even if you can disable it.

by Thomas Zander (not verified)

I always compile from sources and remove artsd from the installed dir after everything has been installed correcty.

by N3wb1e (not verified)

sorry for the dumb question, but wtf is Nove Hrady?

by Anonymous (not verified)

Nove Hrady is a town in the Czech Republic where the KDE Developer's Conference 2003 will take place: http://dot.kde.org/1051497356/

by Datschge (not verified)

If you want to get a number of reports idling for a long time go to the home page of bugs.kde.org, scroll down to the "open reports idling..." thingy, set it to eg. "from one quarter to forever", click "show" and you'll get all open reports idling for more than four months (atm it results in 5430 reports including wishes, many of them are surely duplicates or simply outdated).

We really need an organized bug squadron to eliminate all useless reports ensuring that bugs.kde.org gets even more efficient.

by rotary (not verified)

Good to see mosfet getting more and more involved in kde development. I remember as one of the most vocal KDE developers way way back when in the debian-legal mailing list ;)

mosfet vs. knightbrd (I believe this was the nick.. I forget exactly) flame throwings were always entertaining.

by Russell Miller (not verified)

There was an entertaining flamewar on the list - that, oddly enough, didn't involve mosfet - recently. I didn't cover it because I didn't deem the subject interesting enough to justify covering such an inflammatory post. You might want to look back in the archives for a couple of weeks - I believe the post was about a person who wanted to "program", but not "code". It also spilled out into the dot.

The ironic thing was that, mostly, those who were best qualified to refute most of his points were experienced enough to know not to reply. (I'm painting with a broad brush here, so please no one take offense)

--Russell

by Datschge (not verified)

Uhm, we had the same here on dotty as well and I think it got resolved sufficiently. I don't think we need a review of it, it's past now.

by Russell Miller (not verified)

Please distinguish my postings here from an extension of kde-traffic. I speak for myself and not for kde-traffic unless I'm actually speaking directly about kde-traffic. If that makes sense.

I guess, IOW, think of anything I say here as inside the "editorialize" tag. There's a reason I didn't report that flamewar on kde-traffic.

However, this does give me an idea for kde-traffic. I'll have to mull it over for a while and then get feedback, it's just off-the-wall enough that it might ruffle a few feathers.

--Russell

by Datschge (not verified)

Are you thinking of some entertaining soap opera style for kde-traffic? A la "White trash battling it out in public, throwing chairs at each other. X crying about Y's other women. ..." perhaps? ;)

by Russell Miller (not verified)

Nothing quite so tacky. Just something like a "hall of shame" that flamewar participants would get their names up on. But even that is a little "out there", and would require a great deal of thought before implementing.

--Russell

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

> There was an entertaining flamewar on the list

I am glad to see that someone else found it entertaining. :-D

I think that there is a difference between inflammatory and provocative. I intended the original porting to be proactive, to provoke a discussion.

I was disappointed that it didn't. If you will take the trouble to review it carefully, you will see that it mostly degenerated into flaming about side issues, and there were no answers to my actual ideas and/or suggestions.

> I believe the post was about a person who wanted to "program", but not "code". It also spilled out into the dot.

I am also disappointed that you failed to understand the point I was trying to make about how I could contribute. I said that, and say again, that I can help with the design/engineering even though I don't feel that at the present time I can contribute code.

Since you have provided an e-mail address, I will send you a private mail about this.

--
JRT

by Anonymous (not verified)

Mosfet isn't really much involved in KDE development nowadays. Seems he only appears when he has a chance to make it into the news like this time again.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Seems some people are jealous of him.

by Erik Hensema (not verified)

You can be active in development without doing any coding.

by anon (not verified)

He could very well be doing KDE development without being part of the core team. Mosfet has made some cool KDE hacks and some of them are not as well-known as they should be. Pixie was freaking cool man but nobody distributes it anymore.

by uga (not verified)

> Pixie was freaking cool man but nobody distributes it anymore.

Huh? I think SuSe has packages for Pixie... am I wrong? A friend was upgrading to 8.2 yesterday, and I think I saw this package.

by Mosfet (not verified)

Yep, Suse and Debian have official packages of PixiePlus, FreeBSD has a package that I believe is official, and there are unofficial packages for dists like Mandrake. Of course, PixiePlus is actively developed and you can download it from mosfet.org, too ;-) I'm going to try to more heavily promote the next release, it kicks butt.

As a matter of fact I've done a ton of coding recently, mostly concerning PixiePlus. The next version will be Beta1 in preparation for a 1.0 release. Since I haven't updated my page in awhile I'll attach the ChangeLog so far. Lots of work going on and I'm not finished yet :)

by David Johnson (not verified)

There is an port of PixiePlus for FreeBSD that's as "official" as any port can be. It works quite well. Keep up the good work.

by Anon (not verified)

What about MosfetPaint? I saw the screenshots on your site but no downloads. Is it not better to allow downloads and then get user's response about bugs?

by Mosfet (not verified)

MosfetPaint won't be ready for public consumption until after PixiePlus 1.0. I don't have time to seriously work on both at the same time. I usually don't release code until I feel it is at least somewhat usable, and MosfetPaint isn't yet.

by anon (not verified)

Good to hear. Mandrake 9.1 doesn't have it although maybe the power pack does.

by reihal (not verified)

PixiePlus is in my SuSE 8.1, so it should be in 8.2 as well.
I like it.

by Mario (not verified)

It seems to be quite good even though Gthumb has been great so far, I still want to see Pixie beta 1. I mgiht even switch ;)

Also, how's liquid going? Are you thinking of implementing flashing buttons like in OS X, that's IMO what's really missing from taht theme. Flashing buttons to match the HPL window decoration which on hover makes buttons flash would be great.

by Mosfet (not verified)

I played around with that on mouse hover using threads and found it to be rather buggy. You can get away with a non-threaded version for the window manager because since the window manager is separate from the application it doesn't get bogged down when the application is busy. The widgets are a different story: if the application is busy and not updating the GUI the buttons won't flash or will do so sporadically, which looks funny.

The next Liquid release will mostly focus on the window manager. That's really the only part that doesn't work like I feel it should: there is a problem with large titlebar font sizes and the buttons are not configurable.

by Ian Reinhart Geiser (not verified)

Id rather wait a year for the next release if it ment it was more stable, faster, and took less memory. (Yes, all of these things are currently happening in CVS now.) And yes i know the longer we keep CVS open the more features we get, and the longer we freeze the more branches we get... but hey... im running KDE 3.1.2 now on a P166 w/48mb of ram, and its running pretty well... Takes less memory than 3.0 did anyway.

Throw in time to get Qt 3.2.1 out the door and we have a recipie for a solid KDE release.

Just my 2c I know its no so simple, but we are so far ahead of Gnome, lets take our time and to it right.

-ian reinhart geiser

by rotary (not verified)

> Just my 2c I know its no so simple, but we are so far ahead of Gnome, lets take our time and to it right.

KDE and GNOME should really focus on pulling users from windows, macos, etc.. not each other. These days, most people who use KDE will use KDE, and most people who use GNOME use GNOME.

But KDE is not that far ahead of GNOME in everything anymore. I do think that in terms of features and technology, KDE is still way ahead of KDE. But on the other hand, I doubt that anybody at all will argue that usability in KDE is way behind that of GNOME.

And based on your personal philosophy, it sounds like moving up KDE 3.2 would be a good thing in the face of XD2 (coming out REAL soon.. see http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3705), and GNOME 2.4 (coming out Sept I beleive..) Ximian Desktop2 looks to be real polished-- something KDE has not been lacking since KDE 2.2 or so, imho.. it's all about the feature creep :)

by yg (not verified)

> But KDE is not that far ahead of GNOME in everything anymore....

hahaha! have you tried to modify a shortcut which you placed on your desktop with GNOME
(e.g. change the executable it launches)

well bingo... That is not possible with a current GNOME (the one from RH9 e.g.)

and I swear you thats no joke !

...another thing that really bothered my is that you _cannot_ turn of the window animation
that occurs while maximizine/minimizing.

... and have you seen the file-open dialog? I wonder why the can (or want) not improve it before
GNOME 2.6 (!!!) now they are at 2.2.X

anyway... we have the choice, and mine is called KDE

by fault (not verified)

> and have you seen the file-open dialog? I wonder why the can (or want) not improve it before GNOME 2.6 (!!!) now they are at 2.2.X

Actually, gnome 2.3.2 (unstable branch), has a new file open dialog.. Ximian Desktop 2.0, coming out next week, also has a new file open dialog (as did Ximian Desktop 1.4)

> hahaha! have you tried to modify a shortcut which you placed on your desktop with GNOME. well bingo... That is not possible with a current GNOME (the one from RH9 e.g.)

Yeah, I beleive that wasn't possible in gnome 2.2. Of course, it wasn't possible with classic MacOS either, which gnome reminds me of (nostalgically.. I was a die-hard Mac user until 1998 or so.)

It is possible in the gnome running on my system (2.3.2), which will eventually be 2.4.

> ...another thing that really bothered my is that you _cannot_ turn of the window animation that occurs while maximizine/minimizing.

*shrug*.. there is probably some obscure gconf key somewhere. an website documenting these things in gnome would be good. Some people talk and talk about how culturred kcontrol is (which it is), but don't realize that it's as hard to find something like this in gconf.

> anyway... we have the choice, and mine is called KDE

Yup. I use KDE 99% of the time, but gnome is still a nice desktop environment. In some ways it's ahead of KDE, and in other ways, it's quite behind. I think the two desktops have gone in different focuses now, which might actually be a good thing. In the end, choice is a very good thing.

by andreas (not verified)

The Differrence is:

Gnome Developers do what they want...
Kde Developers do what the user wishes...

by Thomas (not verified)

No... not true... Developers on each side do what they want...
imo the gnome-camp has to deal a lot more about this 'how to strip down the UI to make it useable for dumb users'-stuff (because of the involved companies) than the kde-camp does. MS has to deal with a lot of dumb users, too... That's why they need to pay their developers some money, otherwise nobody would like to program on a crippled interface like Windows ;-)

by Datschge (not verified)

But (yeah, the famous "but" ;) another important fact is: KDE's bug tracker has a voting system, and high voted bugs and wishes actually get pretty much attention by developers. Gnome's bugzilla got that feature taken out so there is no way people can easily move the attention to certain bugs except crowding the report message boards which tend to be counterproductive most of the time, decreasing the efficiency of the whole system afaics.

by Matthias Warkus (not verified)

Last time I checked, GNOME's Bugzilla had a voting system. That was yesterday, I think.

by anon (not verified)

yes, but in june it didn't =(

by Anonymous (not verified)

So how do you search for votes with http://bugzilla.gnome.org/query.cgi?

by cbcbcb (not verified)

> hahaha! have you tried to modify a shortcut which you placed
> on your desktop with GNOME (e.g. change the executable it launches)

Have you tried modifying a shortcut you've placed on the panel in KDE? (this used to have the same problem, can't check just now as I'm using windowmaker nowadays)

by jadrian (not verified)

Yeap did it yeasterday, and worked fine.

Off Topic:
By the way, I did it because I couldn't run more than one kfmclient... when I clicked the browser or filemanager icon on kicker a snd time I would get nothing. It worked fine on day, suddenly it stoped working :-/
Changed it to konqueror --profile ... and it worked... very weird.
(SuSE 8.2, kde 3.1.1)
I'll probably bug report it, but have no idea how to gather info on this one. Ran it in konsole and all I got was an error msg saying kdeinit couldn't launch kfmclient.

by Ian Reinhart Geiser (not verified)

Dont make me come to your house and force you to report a bug!
I DONT CARE if its a packaging bug, or a human error bug, or if its whatever. We have a bug system for a reason. Worst case the maintainer wont get to it BUT its noted. Its recorded. People wont suffer. The worst thing you can do to KDE is to not report bugs and just complain about them here. Nothing sucks more than finding out my shiny new KDE barfs on some users strange system, especially because I only test the systems that my clients use.

Please please, file those bug reports.

Cheers
-ian reinhart geiser

by jadrian (not verified)

No worries, you can search my nick in the the kde bugs database. I report, comment and vote on bugs.
Just wondering how I could get more info on this kind of stuff before reporting it... and thinking out loud here in the forum. If I don't manage to get more info about it, I'll just end up posting what I have on bugs.kde.org.

by Matthias Warkus (not verified)

"... and have you seen the file-open dialog? I wonder why the can (or want) not improve it before GNOME 2.6 (!!!) now they are at 2.2.X"

You see, it took a hell of a lot of infrastructure work to get to a file selector that will work both with and without GNOME-VFS in place to support both GNOME applications and GTK+ applications. Furthermore, the thing should be slick UI-wise (no horizontal scrolling, yuck) and it should appeal to Joe Slashdot who has been clamouring for a new file selector for about two years now.
I think KDE took the easy way out -- KDE's and Qt's file selectors are not the same AFAIK.
Oh, but then you work with a widget set that is much more third-party than ours, so you probably can't avoid that sort of problem.