Feature Plans for KDE 4.2 / 4.3

Hi KDE developers: As KDE 4.2 is about to be released you should move all your features that did not make it into the KDE 4.2 release to the KDE 4.3 feature plan. Thanks! :)

Compile Time

Recompiling kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase, kdesdk, kdeplasma-addons, playground/base/plasma all in all takes about 2h 13min on my t41p (1.7GHz, 1.5GB ram). It's still quite fast imo, but I imagine with today's hardware it's maybe 30 minutes? See below for detailed infos. I'm using mpyne's excellent kdesvn-build scripts to build KDE from trunk. I even believe this should be the default way for building trunk instead of the rough road we propose on techbase right now. Are there any reasons not to use kdesvn-build?

Building kdelibs (1/6)
       Preparing build system for kdelibs.
       Running cmake...
       Compiling, attempt 1...
       Build succeeded after 44 minutes, and 56 seconds.
       Installing kdelibs.
       Overall time for kdelibs was 48 minutes, and 49 seconds.

Building kdepimlibs (2/6)
       Preparing build system for kdepimlibs.
       Running cmake...
       Compiling, attempt 1...
       Build succeeded after 7 minutes, and 53 seconds.
       Installing kdepimlibs.
       Overall time for kdepimlibs was 8 minutes, and 14 seconds.

Building kdebase (3/6)
       Preparing build system for kdebase.
       Running cmake...
       Compiling, attempt 1...
       Build succeeded after 52 minutes, and 35 seconds.
       Installing kdebase.
       Overall time for kdebase was 57 minutes, and 44 seconds.

Building kdesdk (4/6) # note: several subdirs commented out
       Preparing build system for kdesdk.
       Running cmake...
       Compiling, attempt 1...
       Build succeeded after 8 minutes, and 26 seconds.
       Installing kdesdk.
       Overall time for kdesdk was 8 minutes, and 45 seconds.

Building kdeplasma-addons (5/6)
       Preparing build system for kdeplasma-addons.
       Running cmake...
       Compiling, attempt 1...
       Build succeeded after 6 minutes, and 15 seconds.
       Installing kdeplasma-addons.
       Overall time for kdeplasma-addons was 6 minutes, and 24 seconds.

Building plasma (6/6) # this is: playground/base/plasma
       Preparing build system for plasma.
       Running cmake...
       Compiling, attempt 1...
       Build succeeded after 3 minutes, and 25 seconds.
       Installing plasma.
       Overall time for plasma was 3 minutes, and 35 seconds.

Quickie: Faster compilation with cmake

It happens again and again that developers complain about cmake being too slow when compiling after a quick change. The solution is to use

• make $target/fast
• make install/fast

This way, cmake skips the dependency checking. As example, whenever I change code in kdelibs/kate, I type make katepart/fast and make install/fast.

System Load Viewer

Last year I've blogged about the missing system monitor with the three bars for the panel and about its port to Plasma. Meanwhile other developers also did a port called System Status. In a collaboration with them we finally have the applet back in KDE's subversion, the name is now "System Load Viewer" and it uses the data engine "systemmonitor" that already exists in KDE 4.2.
So if you want to have the plasmoid for your KDE4.2 desktop, it should be straightforward to compile/install.
On the screenshot you can see the plasmoid in action. There are two instances, one on the panel and one on the desktop. The one on the left is the KDE3 one.

It's worth to mention that the plasmoid already supports more featues than the KDE3 version. Features include:

• show all cpus (for computers with multicores)
• tooltip updates continuously
• nicer visualization (maybe needs some more tweaks)
  

As soon as the KDE 4.2 freeze is over we'll have to see where we can put the plasmoid to make sure it's available for KDE 4.3 :)