KDE Commit-Digest for 6th May 2007

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Atlantik, KFouleggs, Klickety, KPoker, Kenolaba, KAsteroids, KSnake, KSokoban, KJumpingCube and KTron move to playground/games. KDE 3.90.1 (KDE Alpha 1) is tagged to be released. General improvements in KTorrent. Progress in the generic music store support in Amarok. KFTPGrabber begins the port to KDE 4. The phonon-solid-sprint branch is merged back into trunk. BluRay and HD-DVD support in Solid. NEPOMUK-KDE components moved from kdereview to kdelibs in time for KDE 4. kwin_composite is merged back into trunk, becoming the window manager for KDE 4. Further progress in the Konsole refactoring effort, with the refactor branch merged back into trunk for KDE 4. More progress in kdegames. KSudoku moves to kdereview. Konqueror Userscript Plugin is imported into KDE SVN. Nuvola is imported into kdeartwork as another new iconset for KDE 4.

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Comments

by E (not verified)

Is it sad I have spent quite a few hours refreshing the dot waiting for today's commit digest? :)

Thanks a lot for your excellent work, Danny!

by zonk (not verified)

Ever heard about RSS? KDE even has a reader called Akregator...

by Sutoka (not verified)

He would then be having to refetch the RSS feed, no difference made.

by Jucato (not verified)

But he wouldn't have to hit the fetch button himself, would he? ;)

by Sutoka (not verified)

Well if he was using Konqueror he could just set Auto-Refresh and then he wouldn't have to click either. (I wonder how long we could do this till someone says he could just have someone from the Dot tell him on IRC?)

by Erik (not verified)

And Konqueror then puts an icon into the systray to alert about the arrival of a new message?

lg
Erik

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

this is a silly thread =)

akregator watches the rss for you and pops a nice little icon in your systray when there is something to read. hooray! =)

by me (not verified)

... but probably, at least in this case, Akregator isn't able to turn on :)

by Danny Allen (not verified)

Well, I would do the same - I don't use RSS feeds personally ;)

Danny

by Chani (not verified)

but, but, akgregator is shiny!
it's like tabbed browsing... I didn't see the point until I tried it, and now I get really annoyed if I have to go without.

by RandomOne (not verified)

Yes.

by Dolphin rulez ;) (not verified)

It's not good that there is no RSS feed favicon in firefox/opera's adres bar. If this favicon would be there user "E" haven't had to spent a few hours refreshing the dot waiting for digest. :)

Think about this. This would be better becouse non kde users which don't have agregator could subsxcribe to Dot!

by zonk (not verified)

There is an "rdf" link on the left side of the main page, that leads to the feed. Though I really think it should be more visible, and better described, so that non-techies can find it...

by Alec Munro (not verified)

This is probably the commit-digest that has me the most excited. Obviously, the KDE 4 Alpha is pretty cool, but I'm a big fan of KTorrent, I've been looking forward to generic music store support in Amarok (got to get emusic!), and while I'm not entirely satisfied with it, KFTPGrabber is still my FTP client of choice.
It's a great selection for me!

by Emil Sedgh (not verified)

Nice to see that "got the Dot" comments are readed by developers and attracting them.

"However, it is not all doom and gloom. In the aftermath of a KDE News article detailing the changes, many people with programming knowledge have stepped forward to see if they can save their favourite games. I predict that the cut list will be shorter when KDE 4.0 is released (and again shorter when KDE 4.1 is out)."

"Remove the double frame around the view which KDE.dotters complained about."

" Remove frame around playing field and margin between playing field and window border - for consistancy with other games ( eg kreversi , kbounce )"

"Remove frame and spacing around play area. Removed frame around score box. Use flat group boxes for the info pane. This works well in the Clearlooks and upcoming Oxygen styles, but not so well in the KDE 3ish Plastik theme."

by Martin Stubenschrott (not verified)

That's fantastic!!

Awesome, which such small changes KDE4 will look MUCH nicer and cleaner, thanks for all devs which read the comments and changed the frames!

by AC (not verified)

How does KTorrent compare to the newer QBitTorrent in terms of speed and memory efficiency?

http://qbittorrent.sourceforge.net/

The authors of QBitTorrent claim that by building on top of LibTorrent (http://www.libtorrent.net) there is less overhead in coding the app because the "business logic" is shared with other Bittorrent projects and consequently there are more people to fix bugs. LibTorrent also claims to be very fast and memory efficient, and there is no language barrier with Qt apps because LibTorrent is also written in C++.

by Sarath (not verified)

Qbittorrent is very good. I use at it home, and it averages around 21MB of ram usage. It is a minimal client, but I love the ram usage, and plus it does a decent job of downloads :) I am hoping that ktorrent catches up, I love its interface much better.

by zonk (not verified)

Given that µTorrent is satisfied with less than 6MB of RAM, some people prefer Wine'ing it instead. Other (like me), switched to console-based rTorrent. Linux still needs a good, non-bloated GUI BT client...

by Jim (not verified)

Why? Bloat is highly overrated given the appearance of shared libs "bloating" the profile of the app. Isn't an apps job to make life easier through features etc?

Personally I think KTorrent is incredible.

Maybe those small footprint apps are great and easy to use etc .. but the "bloat" comments are SOOO late 1990's.

by Henry Miller (not verified)

While on the whole I agree with the sentiment, beware that linux still runs on old systems. There are people who first try linux on old machines from the late 1990s, and bloat is still an issue there. Also, in the embedded market cost is often a major factor, so systems are very under powered compared to what you can buy locally: bloat is a major issue again. (linux is very strong in the embedded market)

So while KDE as a whole needs to move beyond bloat - after all normal people can afford 1 gig of RAM, and 2+ Ghz processors (the former was unaffordable in the late 1990s, and the latter didn't exist at any price), so we should take advantage of them. However lets not forget where we came from either. Sometimes bloat is still an issue. Where we can prevent bloat we should do so. However where bloat == features that people love we should add bloat.

by Fede (not verified)

I think he was referring to the fact that the amount of memory used by kdelibs that ktorrent use is counted on ktorrent's memory usage, even if they are shared libraries that are already loaded by the desktop, other programs, etc. So even if ktorrent per se was pretty lightweight, that overhead would still make it seem bloated. Of course, using ktorrent on a desktop other than kde would result in high memory usage because then ktorrent would more likely be the only user of those libraries.

by zonk (not verified)

Well, maybe the comments are SOOO late 1990's, but my PC is not so late 1990's...

by Matt (not verified)

GUI _is_ bloat for a bittorrent client IMO. That's why I use rTorrent (CLI, no ncurses, C++).

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

Yes, I do use uTorrent with Wine, for two reasons:
I did not found any torrent client as fast (downlading speed) as it exept for Azureus that is way too bloated.
It is very lightweight, even running with Wine, and my PC is a Duron 1.6 with 512 RAM, so less bloat IS A GOOD THING yes. :-P

by Techzilla (not verified)

have not used QBittorrent as of yet, but i love Ktorrent. I have never had such a positive expieriance with torrent in YEARS. I used to only get acceptable speeds with bittonado, and utorrent was never my cup of tea. azures uses a JVM (i dont have ANY java on any of my machines...ever) plus i never really like it when i did use it on a buddy's linux workstation.

by Anderson (not verified)

Will we have a KhdDVDbackup at KDE4? Is it possible to merge at KDE4 (if someone code a GUI frontend to hdDVDbackup) such software?

09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0

by Gregor (not verified)

probably not. very limited user base, anyway?
so what?

<09-25-17-02-116-227-91-216-65-86-197-99-86-136-192>_10

by Mark Hannessen (not verified)

I am sure you can use a kde frontend for mencoder to do this...

by Bert (not verified)

So the alpha version is going to be released?

I wonder when you can recommend me to install a developer version. Are there guides on how to compile KDE?

I mean currently KDE4 coding is a bit monasty style, hmm?

by Eike Hein (not verified)

There have been several snapshot releases aimed at outside application developers already. http://techbase.kde.org/ has a large amount of guides and tutorials covering KDE4 coding.

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

> I wonder when you can recommend me to install a developer version.

now is a decent time.

> Are there guides on how to compile KDE?

yes and they are on TechBase: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started

> I mean currently KDE4 coding is a bit monasty style, hmm?

monasty style? hm.. monastic style? in a convent for monks? not sure i'm getting what you're saying here =) care to explain more?

by AC (not verified)

I think they mean cathedral style.

by Anne-Marie Mahfouf (not verified)

There will be on techbase a detailed guide to compile the Alpha 1 tarballs so you will be able to set up your development user as soon as the Alpha 1 is released.
Welcome to the exciting KDE 4 development world!

by ac (not verified)

When is it going to be released, by the way? Did it get pushed back to some concrete date, or is it a "any minute now"?

by Patcito (not verified)

October 23rd 2007

by ac (not verified)

I was asking about the aforementioned Alpha 1.

by superstoned (not verified)

Anytime now, indeed. I expected it last week, actually...

by Luca Beltrame (not verified)

Wasn't it supposed to be released a week after being tagged? If so it would be out on the 10th.

by Mike (not verified)

Hey, that's my birthday! Nice present :-)

by Christopher B. Pye (not verified)

what about a live CD?

by superstoned (not verified)

Don't worry, there'll be a few :D

by Peter (not verified)

Konversation (for KDE 3) has had such a search bar for a while now :). It's great.

by superstoned (not verified)

yeah, I wonder if there is any progress on the debate about getting such a thing into kdelibs...

by superstoned (not verified)

yeah, I'm subscribed to that bug. but the last comment is from march... :(

by NamShub (not verified)

Wow I had a bit too much wine yesterday when I wrote the message to Danny... :)

I forgot something really important, the original author of the KDE3 userscript plugin is neofreko (blog.neofreko.com). I took the code and ported it to kde4 but he did the most important parts...

by joker (not verified)

Yeah, I also had too much Wine yesterday. Native linux apps are much better.

by Cypher (not verified)

I'm so sad to see that, again, nothing is going on with Plasma... Are all the KDE developers working on games ? 'cause that's a fact, games (to me, the least important part of KDE) are evolving quickly, and Plasma is still just an idea, a project, nothing more :s

Should expect it to be ready for KDE 4.0 ? Or 4.1 ? Or never ?

by Albert Astals Cid (not verified)

Repeat with me
"You can't force volunteers to do what you want, they do what they want"