Translation of TechBase

As contributors started to translate articles in TechBase to other languages I wrote a quick howto which explains the translation system. It is pretty easy since danimo simplified it with a nifty template :)

Quickies: classmapper, tb

api.kde.org got an overhaul, the redirect of the old class mapper does not work yet, so just edit your web shortcuts and change the one for 'kde:' to point to

• http://api.kde.org/classmapper.php?class=\{@}
• appending &version=3.5 will search in KDE3.5
  

Thanks to Bram, we have a new article called How to create useful crash reports in our tb. It is mainly aimed at users who fill in bug reports in KDE's bug tracking system.

svn up qt-copy...

...and only 1 hour, 35 minutes later it was finished! Enough said.
Update (disambiguation): svn via https took the time, not the compiling itself :-)

KDE@CeBIT: first two days

Carsten was already faster and blogged about day 3@CeBIT - so it's time to talk about the first two days :)
The first two days we had a rather small booth compared to other projects in the LinuxPark (Hall 5): Placed in the corner next to the Debian booth (see photo). However, we managed to attract many interested eyes, and that's after all what's important (see photo).
The CeBIT is very much a business event: many people are wearing suits which is not really surprising as the audience is of course different to for example the LinuxTag. As such they have another background: Sometimes they never even saw KDE. That's good as we could show step by step the power of KDE: the desktop itself (kicker, K-button, desktop), applications like KMail users usually need or Amarok with iPod support.
Sometimes the questions were more detailed, amongst others -- of course -- What will KDE4 look like? This one is very important and we tried to promote the difference between KDE4 and KDE4.0, the very first KDE4 release. In short, KDE4.0 is the first release in the whole KDE4 lifetime. As such will ship new technologies and cleaned up APIs. Many work went into the core of KDE which is not even visible to the user. When KDE4.0 is released applications will first have to use it. It does not make *plop* and we have a full blown KDE4 which can be compared to the thousands of applications available for KDE3.5. Even the KDE4 components itself (like plasma) probably will not contain all the features and be perfect right from the start.
This is even good to some degree: It is perfectly fine if plasma is basically the same as what we know from the KDE3.5 workspace - it's a well and long tested behaviour after all. I think we did a good job with regard to issues like this and the interested parties understood that. We demonstrated KDE4 versions of Kate, Dolphin, KRunner and KSysGuard including the new Oxygen icon theme and the general feedback was positive :)
Besides that, we gave lots of KDE-T-shirts, pins and bags for free (iff they made a small donation). I'm sure I forgot something, but it's a way too late now and I have to be at the decibel hackathon in some hours again *tired* :)

Quickies: D-Bus, TechBase

• DBUS D-Bus
• techbase.kde.org finally has a name
• KDE contributors with an svn account are in the group KDEDevelopers, they additionally have the right to delete pages in techbase... if you are not in this group but have a svn account please let us know (#kde-www)
  
• ...todo: they also should be able to protect pages so that they are only editable for users in the KDEDevelopers group
• techbase uses subpages - please avoid adding toplevel pages :)
  

Developer Wiki Structure

The last friday we had 20 people on IRC in #kde-www, that is a lot compared to the 2-5 people usually sticking around there. Some of those 20 are quite active in the techbase wiki so that we have a constant flow of commits. However, there is still a lot of work to do: Migrating tutorials, architecture pages, and more. As you probably know MediaWiki is usually a flat wiki, that is all pages are usually placed in the top. For instance, this is how Wikipedia works. On KDE's techbase wiki we wanted to have a structure even in the URL if possible. It turned out we were lucky because MediaWiki has a features called sub-pages. In short, a sub-page is something like a parent-child relation (like a sub-folder), and the benefits for us are

• they automatically provide us with a hierarchy which is reflected in the URL itself
• automatically generated backlinks provide easy navigation

For further information, read the page about our wiki structure.

API documentation & refactored kdelibs/kdeui

During the last weeks/days the directory structure of especially kdelibs/kdeui got a major overhaul: in KDE 3 all files of a module were in the same directory which was more or less a mess as you did not know immediately which files belonged to the same category. kdelibs/kdeui in KDE4 has a rather clean structure now (similar to the one in Qt) by using subfolders like

• actions
• dialogs
• widgets
• xmlgui
• several others...

Compare this to KDE3's kdelibs/kdeui structure. For KDE4 this is a huge benefit, as we have clearly defined groups. We already had lots of discussions in the past about API documentation and this is exactly where the new structure is important: In Qt every class usually belongs to a group (example). Our API documentation tool doxygen of course supports grouping, and now it is even easy to know which class should be in which group. For instance, all classes in the widgets directory should be in the 'Widgets' group, and then maybe even more fine-grained divided into sub-groups.
By the way, we have a policy that every widget in kdelibs has a screenshot to immediately see how it looks like - another nice way to get involved :)
All in all this is really awesome and I'd like to thank all involved developers. Next prey is kdelibs/kdecore? =)

Friday is developer wiki day

Some time ago we started to migrate our developer.kde.org pages to a mediawiki based solution at techbase.kde.org. In order to give the wiki a big boost we always meet on fridays on irc.kde.org #kde-www. This friday we will continue to migrate content, besides that we want to find a roadmap and a target date at which we can turn off the old developer pages.
To make this friday an even greater success we need as many volunteers as possible joining us. It is also a nice opportunity to get in touch with the KDE community - we are happy about every new face and - believe us - we don't eat anyone :)

God Jul

I'm back in Germany after my stay in Sweden. All in all, it was an awesome time. I also traveled to the north to a town called Kiruna (indeed starting with a 'K' =) and you probably guess what I found there: snow, lots of snow. To give you an impression here are two images :)That are nice pictures for the current time of year, so God Jul to everyone and KDE :)

developer wiki

Now it's kind of official: The first blog about our new developer wiki by Aaron. I'm very happy the wiki gets more attention, and in fact this is a very good opportunity to get started with KDE. As Aaron already mentioned we want the wiki to become a first class citizen for KDE related developer resources. The main task right now is to port pages from the "old" developer pages to the new wiki. At the same time we can restructure the pages like moving KDE 2 and KDE 3 related content to own pages etc. As it is a wiki, everyone is welcome to help. If you want to get in touch with us join us in irc (irc.kde.org, #kde-www)!
Some time ago I wrote a small perl script with which you can convert the html code of the old developer pages to wiki syntax. It's not perfect, but speeds up the process of porting a page tremendously :)

KateMDI: sidebar and focus...

Since KDE 3.5.5 Kate has its own MDI implementation. It is similar to KMDI but ships with a lot less bugs (yes, and features). One thing bothering me is the focus issue: Which sidebar has the focus? If you do not know, you have to have sharp eyes to find out. In KDE4 I just hacked in such a feature (here is the patch). On the screenshot you can see that every sidebar now has an additional pane on the top. Unfocused sidebars have a gray pane (default window background color), a focused sidebar has a blue pane with white text (just like selected text). Which sidebar has focus? - Right, it's the Documents sidebar :) It work's pretty well, so is it worth committing (a cleaner version of) the patch? I initially hoped that QDockWidgets would provide this functionality by default. Similar discussions take place on kde-core-devel as well (about KTabBar & friends)...

Share Kate Highlighting Files

Thanks to Frank we have a dedicated section for Kate Highlighting files on kde-files.org now. We encourage everyone to publish their .xml files there. The Kate team agreed to add more highlighting files to the official Kate releases, though, as long as they are of general use. For KDE4 we plan to have a section for Kate Indentation scripts, too. But that's content for another blog, which will follow later :)

Kate: More eye-candy

Two years ago we had the KDE conference in Ludwigsburg, Germany. At that time, Martijn Klingens committed a patch to show trailing spaces in Kate. I just change the visualization a bit, the change is in for KDE4 :) Tabs are marked with a '»' character, and spaces with a dot. On the left you can see the old and on the right the new version; Here is a screenshot:

Hibernate

I use the suspend2-sources in Gentoo. After upgrading to XOrg7.1 with newest ATI drivers (fglrx, version 8.29.6) hibernate did not work anymore. Suspend-to-disk hanged at the point: "Doing atomic copy".

While searching the web I found a fix: Edit hibernate.conf (or /etc/hibernate/common.conf) and set

ProcSetting extra_pages_allowance 20000

That did the trick :) Tomorrow will be my second attempt to fly to Dublin. So far it looks pretty promising :)

Bad Luck

As everyone else I wanted to fly to Dublin on friday, too. While packing the day before I noticed I could not find my identity card. To make it short: I was at the airport with a copy and several other papers that (more or less) state my identity, but no luck. There is no way to travel without a valid identity card to Dublin.

So I'll take another plane 5 days later, on wednesday. There is a small chance (maybe 5%) I might be able to come on monday already. Let's see... :)

All in all I'm missing almost all of the highlights, just look into the conference program.

Lesson learned: Start packing 1-2 weeks before. sooooo stupid :(

The Wheel of Time Turns...

...and this time it turns out that I am going to akademy. Dublin I'm coming, wheee! :)

Moving

Last week I moved to Skövde in Sweden. It's a middle-sized town (about 50000 inhabitants iirc) in the central of Sweden just between the two big seas. The weather is quite nice still and so far everything looks interesting. I did not see an elk yet, though :)

In order to have internet access I have to go into a shopping mall. This makes KDE development a bit harder for me as I used to be in contact via IRC a lot and use the web as api reference. That's it for now :)

update 2006-08-21: Skövde has about 50000 inhabitants.

Smart End

Since KDE 3.5.4 Kate Part supports "smart end". Right now it behaves like this when pressing "end":

1. go to last non-space character
   
2. go to the last character (i.e. hit end twice)
   

I'm writing this blog to get feedback about what's the right/expected behaviour. Is it as described above, or should we first go to the very last character, and to the last non-space only when hitting then end-key twice?

Feedback along with why you prefer solution A or B is welcome!

Kate in KDE 3.5.4

Finally, KDE 3.5.4 is out! We were able to fix a lot of issues in Kate and the bug curves went noticeably down. Thanks to all contributors for the nice KDE release :)

Kate: Shortcomings of .kateconfig file

Assume you have a .kateconfig file optimized for C++ code that replaces tabs on save. Now you open a Makefile that contains tabs (due to its strict syntax). If you save the Makefile in kate, the tabs then are replaced which results in a corrupted Makefile.

In other words: The .kateconfig file applies to every file. It lacks mimetype/extension support and thus can lead to unwanted behaviours.

So if you use a .kateconfig file, keep that in mind :) Maybe we should simply use modelines in the h/cpp files for now.