In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Final commits for KDE 4.0 Final before the tagging freeze. KDE 4.0 Final tagged for release. Lots of optimisations and bugs fixed across KDE. Kickoff menu items can now be added to the Plasma desktop or panel. Improved resize and rotate for Plasma applets. Document list sorting in Kate. Various progress in KDevelop. Mailody moves towards using Akonadi for its IMAP functionality, various improvements in Akonadi. Start of a KHotNewStuff2 implementation in Kalzium for downloading molecular files. Experimental IVTV support in the Kalva video player. KGet uses more of the shared implementation of BitTorrent from KTorrent. Printing support for the DVI backend in okular. Improved text handling, support for printing multiple page sizes in a single document, and a much-anticipated Table Flake shape in KOffice (with further work on the Music Flake shape). Lots of work on colour manipulation for KOffice. Kile begins to use Kross as its scripting framework. Start of a new KDE game, KTank. GetHotNewStuff support disabled in okular, search runner disabled in Plasma for KDE 4.0. KHexEdit moved to the unmaintained module. The new Oxygen wallpapers, splashscreen, and sound theme are imported into KDE SVN for KDE 4.0. Read the rest of the Digest here.
Comments
They've undeclared, i.e. Danny doesn't know what they are and is far to polite to ask...
According to the digest, 6.09 % are of unknown gender. That's right. There's more of them than the females.
maybe some girls don't want to let on that they're girls, since some people get so weird about it...
KDE has been pretty good about this in my experience, though. most people seem quite mature :) I don't even think about gender issues most of the time.
"maybe some girls don't want to let on that they're girls, since some people get so weird about it..."
I agree with that, what we're talking about is geeky stuff and you all have to agree that geeky stuff, and not just geeky computing stuff, is just full of scary weirdos...
Don't make assumptions! They actually could be :) But let's stop talking about genders and stereotypes please. It can only spoil a great KDE 4.0 celebration :)
Yea, I didn't add the 6% as they were undeclared. I didn't want to make assumptions. Even if they were all women, the ratio of male to female KDE developers is still very sad. :(
The problem with these "human" statistics is that they are "opt-in" - it is not a condition of getting an SVN account that this information is provided, and this is just a private initiative by me.
Where I don't know the gender of a person, I can often guess from their name. However, this is not possible for other ones, such as age and location, and so those are less complete. And of course, there are new accounts created weekly, which makes the data collection an ongoing effort.
People with KDE SVN accounts can contribute their data at http://commit-digest.org/data/
Danny
Yes they have a better sense of style and beauty. That's why they are models but when it comes to technology? Who said that women can't drive cars :D
"Don't make assumptions! They actually could be :) But let's stop talking about genders and stereotypes please. It can only spoil a great KDE 4.0 celebration :)"
I fully agree. I am stopping right here. Please dis-regard my previous comments and lets not create a flame out of this.
Remember that those percentages are based on the *number of commits* in that week, not the number of contributors (even though the actual classification of contributors is likely similar).
I would welcome a respectful debate on this issue (a comment below states that the ratio of male/female Computer Science students is about 3 to 1 - this has not been my personal experience at university, and this is certainly not the case in the KDE project).
Out of the 991 KDE contributors in my database, 969 are male and 22 are female - and this covers all areas of KDE, including documentation and translation.
Danny
Yea, at my old University. Cal State Monterey Bay it was actually a bit more balanced than that. But anywhere from a 60/40 to a 70/30 split (male/female) would be a good goal to set for the KDE 4.X.Y release cycle.
Computing should be more equal opportunity, and if women are welcomed more into the KDE/Linux world (without stereotypes (bad ones, at least) they will join in.
So instead of perpetuating this stereotype, I suggest that every person that reads this introduces 1-2 female programmers/developers/artists to KDE. Let's see if we can accomplish the goal of an even split by KDE 5.0 :)
But it is equal opportunity. Females obviously don't want it, or care.
It's sexist to think otherwise. As long as the result is what is desired, I wouldn't care if the statistics were the other way around - and I don't think we'd be having these sexist posts, either.
but it *isn't* equal opportunity. you obviously just haven't seen this for yourself. lots of people don't see their own privilege; it's kinda like trying to see the back of your own head.
it's certainly a heck of a lot better than it used to be, but there's always room for improvement. :)
Give it a start Maxine. Gender reassignment is en vogue, I've been told.
I know it's not much but I put about $10 to your account as an appreciation for your work with the digest. I hope you get that new laptop you were hoping to buy.
A big thank you for your effort. I enjoy the digest every week.
Thanks - I got another 2 donations this week, something I really wasn't expecting ;)
Danny
Is there any fast or small readable changelog what features are included/lost in applications?
For example, what features are included in Kmail?
Thank you!
kdepim isn't part of the KDE 4.0 release. You will have to wait for KDE 4.1.
In other words, all features where lost for the time being ;-)
KDE 4 is here with all it's wonderful sounds and glory! A big congratulation to the KDE Team, well done guys :)
I want to thank everybody involved in advance.
> so there's a rhythmic pattern that distinguishes the sounds;
> as opposed to other solutions out there, that rely on making
> the user jump off the chair every time something happens.
*grin* and this sounds really interesting! Looking forward to it!
Will you continue to (ir)regularly publish commit-digests, now that kde4 ist out?
Thanks!
The commit-digest is one of the great bonuses one gets in free software culture.
Based on the unrestricted availability of the base data (who committed what, when, for what reason) and hard work by restless contributors like Danny, the quite technical and huge amount of base data gets transformed into an easy to digest (pun intended) form, for community members to consume who either do not have the time to wade (I'm getting good at this) through all of the base data or don't have the skills or toolsets necessary for accessing it.
Getting back to your question: the commit-digest is a feature not coupled with any specific event such as a release, it has, does and will continue to allow a broader part of our contributors and followers to "know what's going on".