KDE Commit-Digest for 17th February 2008

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Configuration and layout work in Plasma. A whole load of Plasma backports from trunk to the KDE 4.0 branch (for KDE 4.0.2). Plasma applets begin to be ported to use WebKit from Qt 4.4. Color blindness simulation for KMag. Work on support for button form fields, and support for encrypted ODF documents in Okular. More developments in the porting and maintanence of Kooka. Remote KABC resource and an Akonadi to KCal bridge in Akonadi. UPnp integration in Kopete. A rewritten upload plugin for KDevPlatform (used in Quanta and KDevelop). Continued work on a new projection framework in Marble. Undo/Redo work using a "piece table" in Okteta. Optimisations in Kalzium, Amarok, and KGet. A KControl module for configuring imaplib resources in Mailody, and a module for managing emoticon themes in KDE. Start of work on Puck, a tool to convert the Plasma XML user interface format into C++ code. Experiments with a KDE 4 version of Kommander. A branch of KDEPrint to experiment with refactoring and porting to Qt 4.4 (for KDE 4.1). Decibel and the Plasma "Luna" and "Trash" applets move to kdereview. KSystemLog moves into kdeadmin. Import of Smoke and Ruby Plasma bindings. KDE 3.5.9 and KOffice 1.9.95.3 (KOffice 2 Alpha 6) are tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.

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Comments

by Anon (not verified)

Many thanks, Mr Allen :)

by Erunno (not verified)

I'll just drop in and thank you as well. Always a good read and the work is very appreciated.

by alsuren (not verified)

I have been meaning to donate since the new laptop post, and only just got around to it.

The commit digest is more up-to-date than any magazine that goes through a media company before going to print. I donated approximately what I spend on magazines in a year :P.

Keep up the good work.

by furanku (not verified)

"Frist Thnaks" form me as wlel ;)

SCNR, no spelling flame intended ...

by The Troy (not verified)

Apologies if this is a stupid question, but I couldn't find an answer on the commit-digest site (or anywhere else). But when this claims to be a digest of things that have been committed, does it mean in the casual/conventional sense (ex: "I commit to backport some of the Plasma changes for 4.0.2 sometime next week.") or in the version-control sense (ex: "I committed the Plasma changes through svn this morning.")?

by Jim (not verified)

The latter. If you read the digest, you'll see that underneath each change, there's a link to the diff.

by John Tapsell (not verified)

Always the version control sense :)

by anon (not verified)

personally, I like to read the commit before I upgrade, if there is nothing there worth upgrading for I wait. This whole crappy attitude of posting it nearly a week after it is just lazy. It's time Danny, you hand the reins over to someone who can get a digest out timely.

Many home users will be thinking it doesn't matter, but for businesses it does matter to know what is in the updates before committing to them.

You work has been appreciated, but if digest continue to be a week late, I can only see us moving to another desktop environment

by Digest Reader (not verified)

Don't drink and write, honey. Please tell me, where are the ads on this side? Do you even have a slightest idea that the digest is brought to you by a brave man who spends nothing but his free time on this? Instead of having a walk in the sunshine? Or surfing the sea?
Oh, was this your application to take over the digest writing? Sorry, then. Not.

Hey, that's not a bad idea.
We should have ads on this site. All the proceeds go towards the KDE project. Might be a good income source to help offset some of the costs associated with the project. Or to help the programmers out financially that need it.

We could either have banner ads, or google adwords, or something similar. Could the project developers in charge please vote on this?

by jos poortvliet (not verified)

We discussed things like that, but there are many issues involved. Legal (we can't earn money) and social - do we want to let MS advertise here? Do we like google enough to let em make money on us? How does it affect our image? Etc.

We decided to use advertising as little as possible.

by Hardy (not verified)

Sorry, i dislike your comment.

I don't know, how much work this could be, but i think that, if i am in a business, than i don't take the last snapshot ...

There are "normal" releases for those(?) i'm waiting (next Fedora for me), but i never ever take snapshot for more than just playing with the new integrated things like i've done with the daily-release from . 4.0.2 or 4.1.0, see the release-plan.

by anonymous coward (not verified)

What annoys me on the dot is not the casual general anesthesia posting bullshit, but others starting to debate it.

Guys, nothing to see here, move along!

by she (not verified)

whats annoys me even more are people like you who tell others who and if they should respond to anyone
that includes trolls

by winter (not verified)

You anonymous dorks. 1st off, if you are serious about using code from SVN like you say you are, then read all the logs and the code. 2nd, shut your pie whole. You're a whining wanker. Go buy software and get shafted. 3rd, I will repremand you just to show that I appreciate Danny and anyone's ones contribution to the community.

Whining wankers... yawn...

by Grósz Dániel (not verified)

"if digest continue to be a week late, I can only see us moving to another desktop environment"

Which other desktop environment has a weekly commit digest?

by Koko (not verified)

good point! :)

by Lee (not verified)

Windows. Except there, the commits are to your own machine, by botnets ;)

by Tray (not verified)

Danny is writing this on a volunteer basis! Calling him lazy for taking time out of his schedule to do this is an insult to any volunteer who has ever helped out an open source project.

Furthermore, if he 'lets go of the reins' as you suggest, it's very likely that no one else will pick them up, and we'll be left with absolutely no commit digest at all. Is that what you want?

If you want instantaneous info about commits, just watch the kde-commits archive: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-commits&r=1&w=2

by Jim (not verified)

Don't feed the obvious troll, people.

by Dan (not verified)

2/10.

You get four for getting so many responses, but lose one for posting the same comment last week and another for using the name "anon"

by cirehawk (not verified)

You and the other "us" you refer to have fun in another desktop. We don't need your kind around theses parts. :)

by Troy Unrau (not verified)

You know, I sort of agree with this mentality. We (internally) have talked before about poisonous people in the KDE community, but this could just as well extend to users. We don't need poisonous users, and they can go elsewhere while the rest enjoy the project.

I will have to think about this some more, and try to develop some sort of position statement... hrmmm...

by Martin (not verified)

How about a trojan in Konqueror that detects troll posting to the Dot and uninstalls KDE the next time the user gains superuser privileges? Oh, so a post suggesting to trojan KDE could itself be considered trolling? Alright, one moment. I'll just install this package and then come up with something better...... Hey!? what is happ

by Erik (not verified)

LOL ;-) (although he is probably not using Konqueror)

by cirehawk (not verified)

And to be honest, I wasn't saying it in a mean spirited way. I just hate when people try to make demands of someone who is providing them a free service. It would be as if I were giving someone $1,000 dollars out of the kindness of my heart, but they get upset that I don't give it them at the exact moment they want it. I'd rather they say thank you or nothing at all. FOSS is all about choice. If a person wants to move on to something else (no matter how silly the reason), then by all means do it.

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

At the 2007 LGM Bryce Harrington gave a presentation on this topic that was very insightful. His presentation is at http://www.bryceharrington.org/lgm07/, especially http://www.bryceharrington.org/lgm07/03_4_users_vs_contributors.svg. His recent blog entry http://bryceharrington.org/drupal/foss-win-paradox develops the same theme: users can have a negative effect on a project, and the trick is to make users stop considering themselves as entitled consumers and turn them into worthwhile contributors.

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

This is not a reply to the parent comment, but a bit of information to help those they may have confused:

The digest is a summary of the last week's worth of commits to the KDE source repository. It's not about what's in a given release (releases happen periodically, pulled from the source repo) and it's not published to let people see the changes (aka "commits") before they happen but as a report on what (of significance) has changed.

The parent post is either just an outright troll or highly confused (I'm guessing the former).

And Danny: rock on =)

by hias (not verified)

I know, I shouldn't feed the troll, but I want to say that I appreciate the hard work from Danny. So please don't get discouraged by such idiots and keep on doing the digest. And if it helps to get rid of such people, take another week for the digest and let those people move to whichever desktop environment they want. It's a win for KDE if they troll somewhere else.

It's a SUMMARISED list of major changes in the KDE SVN: the DEVELOPERS source repository. It's not a packaged release detail. It's not meant for general consumption. It's not meant to advise/otherwise on upgrading. It's not meant for home users, companies or anyone not involved in development: It can't be "LIVE" or it wouldn't be a "DIGEST".

If you're running your business IT based on this digest your company is in trouble: but not in the way you think it is. If you're not, you have no business posting about what does/doesn't matter for businesses.

So... You're going to switch DE because of a delayed commit digest? Do you change web browsers when you order something online and it turns up late? Did you stumble onto the wrong site? I'm not sure you know how a computer works.

In summary: You, sir, are a moron.

P.S. Danny: Keep up the good work...
I've donated before but will send some more as compensation for putting up with this guy. Evolution owes us all an apology.

by fred (not verified)

Ok, I'll tell you, you can get even better from the weekly commit digest, you can subscribe to kde-commits mailing list and see every single person committing to the KDE source SVN :p Much better right? No need to wait for one week

by JRT (not verified)

Duh!

I don't see the Digest as being at all relevant for the purpose that you wish to use it for. I am not saying that the information that you need shouldn't be available, only that you aren't going to find it in the Digest.

It is simply a digest of what was added to SVN. This tends to emphasize what has been added to TRUNK while the next release is going to be from a BRANCH. Making it a useful source of information, but not for the purpose you want to use if for.

I suggest that you consult the Change Log for the release to obtain the information which you want.

by Richard Van Den Boom (not verified)

>You work has been appreciated, but if digest continue to be a week late, I can
>only see us moving to another desktop environment
I must have fallen in a time shift and suddenly, it's the 1st of april.

by Emil Sedgh (not verified)

Danny, could you see how important is your work on KDE? This guy is on KDE because of Commit-Digest!
Thanks, for all the time you spend on KDE and Commit-Digest, you rock.

@anon: 'us'? talk as yourself not 'us', please.

by Bobby (not verified)

Not defending Danny here but hey! You can switch to Gnome, XFCE or E17, they all have a better Commit Digest. Apart from that I think it would be good if Danny could really pass the baton to you seeing that you know it better ;)

by Adrian Baugh (not verified)

The digest lists bleeding-edge commits. If you use svn kde in a production environment you're insane. This isn't the place to find changelogs for stable kde versions. And if you really need to know what's being committed to svn in a desperate hurry, read the svn logs!

Thanks Danny, the digest does an excellent job of keeping informed those of us who like to follow kde development without actually ploughing through svn in detail.

by Rafael Fernánde... (not verified)

Welcome to the project then !! As I see you have some free time, you will be able to read what's going on at SVN and write down all the most important things. Oh wait... you are not that kind of person. Yeah, I hit the WRONG person. Those kind of people that prefer to say "this sucks" better than getting hands to work and help for some purpose.

Danny is rocking, he does what nobody elses do, and is a hard work. Never forget as Aaron and others said that commit digest is not what you try it to be. It is just a place where you can see how things are going, but is not a release notice with a list of bugfixes or new features.

So, it is nice to before posting, you do some things:

1) Inform yourself.
2) Think.
3) Think again.
4) Write.

Maybe 2 and 3 are sometimes hard, but hey, you can do it. Maybe you aren't of those too... in that case I completely got the dirt on the WRONG person.

Thanks Danny for your incredible work.

by Maarte (not verified)

I'm inclined to believe you to be little more than a spoiled, self-indulgent troll with an over-inflated ego. That you didn't even have the decency to give your name shows how much of a coward you are. You are far from any part of the community, and you fail at life. Spread your poisonous ego elsewhere.

by Mate (not verified)

Danny, you rock! Don't get insulted by such trolls! I am looking forward to the next reader's, err.. sorry, commit digest!

PS: Given the number of people who donated money towards your laptop (me included) you probably know how much your effort is appreciated :)

by Gabriel Gazzán (not verified)

Don't you have anything more productive to do than light crtizising?
At least give your real name!
You suck.

by nicolas (not verified)

Casse toi, pauvre con! *

... but actually Aaron might be right, and you are simply confusing the digest with some changelogs of some kde release. Very unlikely of course, as noted by Aaron himself.
And the link from Boudewijn is definitively of striking actuality.

* this slightly aggressive ;-) sentence was used a few days ago by the actual and very respectable french president for a much minor offence towards his own person.

by nuno pinheiro (not verified)

Men this kind of coments will achive only one thing.... no more digest...

by Anon (not verified)

Will Kooka be supporting the google supported open source OCR project "Tesseract OCR" ? http://sourceforge.net/projects/tesseract-ocr

Please!!!! We need a better OCR program for Kooka!! It'll benefit everyone, gocr is sooo bad.

Below: gocr output, from a human readable scan!

_le Work ol J8mes S__g Ifwe sµe8X 0f 1he class_c_al _n Sr_1__ug _c _s no( ro _mply
ni 0Y k_nd ofrevival_st tendency, bu1 I9ther 1u su_mr that
Rn_I1 M9xwc,II I_e _was _IIle__esl__ _n thc idca u( a .m7TI ut gcncric
C_9x_c_sm, oE _he k_nd rl>8t_IIn Rowe cl8imed La firld iu
the vrnrk ofk Corb usIfx . fndfed , _1 j kkely rhn r Rowe 's
Re_fwing the c8r91nguf nI n renoc exh_b_rion oE _e __>1erprelnt_on of the cl8scic81 ns 8 r_urrig inçIreInen1 to
wurk oE _9rl Fr_edr_eh Sch_nkel a1 1I>c V_ctur_a 9nd m9nnerisIn, was 8don1ed byS_irI_n6 ns ni lJ_u(lmr 1_iv_Idi;
AIhe,rt Mutcum, a thn_v which mvered nll nsmcM nt tvhilc I>e never het_itnted _n _clc0m__ modem'sm. 8nd

by Lee (not verified)

Oh dear. That's bad :)

It's always nice to know that the FOSS world has world-class products, and so tesseract's engine would be great to have for actual OCRing. I think we'd really need a layer on top of that which supports page layout analysis, though. These days, any decent OCR program should be able to output a fairly close copy of the original, but translated into html (images, text, tables, etc.) and/or ODF.

by Anon (not verified)

vote for the wish to add tesseract ocr to kooka.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135253

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

Don't spit on gocr, there are testcases where it performs a lot better than Tesseract. But yes, support for Tesseract would be nice to have.

by Mate (not verified)

Maybe, but I have a lot of problems with it... but I know it is a *very* difficult task. Also, there is a lot of money to be earned if you know this kind of stuff (OCR is very hot for multiple reasons), so asking it to be done free will not yield the best results.

I like gocr, but I would love to have it improved! :)

by Anon (not verified)

I visited the irc://irc.kde.org/#okular and asked if there was the same 4 sheets to 1 physical print out limitation as in kpdf. I was corrected that it is a kdeprint limitation which is apparently dead for kde4. instead there's a new limitation and okular can only print 1 page per sheet of paper, oh boy... can someone please fix this?!

(I would if i could)

by Brad Hards (not verified)

Wishlist items on the the dot and IRC are likely to be missed or forgotten or misunderstood (sorry, I don't understand your issue, but you are just Anon...).

Please, please, file wishlist bug reports if you want changes. Then we can don't forget, don't miss it, and can ask you questions if we aren't sure what you want.

by Anon (not verified)

for example. you have a 12 page pdf document. I want the entire document printed on 2 pages of paper. Okular would have to support printing 6 pages (of the pdf) onto 1 page of paper.

fyi https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158314

:) thanks for reminding me though!