Kubuntu has packages for 4.8 bringing updates to Plasma workspaces and a load of KDE Applications.

To quote a nice user posting on kde-devel

"I upgraded to Ubuntu's Precise Alpha 1 a few days ago. After the upgrade completed, I tried out KDE 4.8 RC 2. It worked great until the final release of KDE 4.8 Final. KDE 4.8 Final is even better than the RC!"

or later in the same thread

"KDE 4.8 is rocking for me too.Using the Kubuntu PPA's on Sandy Bridge system and it's just lightning fast to do anything. "

Earlier this year Jono mused about getting older. Ah bless, I remember him when he was just a whippersnapper promoting KDE at a warehouse in Birmingham.

Today is my turn to reach my 30s and I had it all planned out. I was going to be living on a tropical island with loads of awesome beaches, reliable and warm surf to learn how to use a waveski (sit on top canoe kayak for surfing) while speaking fluent French and drinking ti'punch (rhum agricole, lime, and cane syrup). I spent a lovely month there meeting new people, trying new things, working in the sunshine with a swimming pool a meter away for when something is compiling.

But I did not count on one problem, the French drive on the wrong side of the road. I don't remember the accident but I remember a couple of days in hospital being like a dream drifting in and out of consciousness, speaking (what I thought was) surprisingly good French to the doctors. After three days they sent me home in a taxi with my MRI scan results, which being concussed I left in the taxi. Fortunately I have an excellent family and my dad flew out there to sort out the status with the polis (who had got a story from the guy who crashed into me that sounded like he had learnt his physics from car chase films) and the car rental company (that car won't be on the roads again) and the canoe club (nice kit rescued from the smashed up car) and took me on a flight back home.

The lovely NHS (the independent Scottish one, not the about-to-be-privatised English one) had GPs and MRI scanners and eye specialists look at me. My eyes are very squint, muscle damage in one means the image is at a different angle in each of the eyes and I can only look out of each eye one at a time. The doctors expect this to get better over the next weeks to months. My brain feels a bit woozy, like I've been sipping low quality beer. I'm feeling more lethargic then usual and because everyone tells me to rest I don't want to set my alarm clock early so have no way to get back on European time, a quick prescription for metacinin should fix that (surprisingly hard to get hold of, in most countries it's not even a prescription thing).

So Kubuntu has been a bit slow to get started and we missed the first alpha (testing ISOs can be boring but this time I really was comatose) for the precise release but all the packages got merged and we have bits like a KDE SC and Calligra betas packaged. I've a long todo list which should keep me busy next year.

And I very much love my life, excellent family, top friends, satisfying physical hobby (nearly done building the east wing to the canoe club) and excellent awesome intellectual one which I'm fortunate enough is also my job (lets see if Kubuntu can help Plasma Active do that world domination thing in 2012).

I'm looking forward to my 30s. Happy Riddellmas and have a great hogmanay to start 2012.

Hacking between sessions, Quintasan, fregl, afiestas

The Ubuntu Developer Summit was in Florida again for a week of sessions, specs,
work items, discussions and mouse burgers. We had a lot of useful Kubuntu
sessions and came up with a long list of things to do over the next six months.

The
list of specs gives the work items, our Todo list for the Precise cycle.

In Kubuntu Precise Packaging we discussed what we should package for the
forthcoming LTS release. Whereas Ubuntu Desktop will not be upgrading to the
latest Gnome we decided that upgrading to the latest KDE releases is safe enough
for an LTS. There's no new library version coming (because of KDE Frameworks 5)
and some packages such as Kontact really need the latest version. We're looking
forward to formal releases from Calligra, qt-at-spi, Plasma Networkmanagement
and more. Integration of bluetooth keyboard on boot and Oxygen-gtk3 should make
some use cases smoother. There are also grand plans to make awesome ninja
scripts which will automate a lot of the Software Compilation packaging which
would allow us to focus on testing and assurance rather than the boring stuff of
updating changelogs.

Chat and beer in the evenings, agateau, afiestas, claydoh, rbelem

In Kubuntu Precise Defaults we want to look at low-fat settings by
default for low powered machines, we'd like to get LightDM up to scratch for
KDE and use that by default and we'll consider using KDE Telepathy instead of
Kopete (but only if it's really ready).

Being a Long Term Support edition what we care about is
Quality. So our quality sessions looked at ways to ensure no new problems
creap in and old problems get squished out. We'd like to be part of a KDE
papercuts initiative that David Edmundson has recently suggested.

In the
Muon spec we have some fixes to our shiny new package manager. And is that
the sound of Ubuntu One being ported to PyQt I hear?

Kubuntu Active is the name of our morning exercise programme and also hopefully a new variant of your favourite distro focused on tablets and low powered consumer devices featuring the shiny Plasma Active.

Finally we have important fixes to CJK, to Samba filesharing and to Qt Accessibility.

All together a nice little package. Should be a fun six months. Do come along and help us make it happen, we're in the #kubuntu-devel IRC channel.

Group Photo: Frederik, Lynoure, Clay, Michel, David, Maco, Luke, Jonathan, Rodrigo (missing Alex for some reason, but he's in this one.

Now I'm off on a little adventure and self improvement exercise as I
move to a little bit of France in the Antillies pour parler Français, see my personal blog Moving to Guadeloupe for the story.

French Rum in my new home

Canonical has a company scheme where after working there for a few years you can
rotate to work at another part of the company for 6 months. Having worked on
the desktop team for over five years I decided to do a rotation to Bazaar. My
hopes for this were to build up my own programming skills by learning more
Python and by experiencing different programming practices from the ones I'm
used to in KDE.

I started off with some fixes to the developer documentation. This got me used
to the process that you can not commit directly to bzr's trunk, instead all
committers are required to make merge proposals on Launchpad, have those
approved by a fellow developer, then send it to a programme called Patch Queue
Manager which will integrate the patch and run the test suite to check
everything still works.

Next I started fixing a few easy command line UI bugs, improving error messages
or stopping exception output and so forth. This got me into the world of
writing test cases. Everything in bzr needs a test case, merge proposals will
not be accepted without them. Like much of bzr I find that the test cases lack
API documentation and comments but it turns out they are easy enough to read
and similarly easy to write. There are both internal test cases, which run a
small part of the code within bzr, and blackbox test cases which run a bzr
command.

Bazaar is the version control system used by top open source project hosting
site Launchpad so I was surprised to come accross a bug which prevented
bzr from talking to Launchpad properly on errors. "This is really important
to fix. We need error reporting." said Jonathan Lange over 2 years before.
Pleasingly I could fix it, very satisfying. I had to learn about the hooks
mechanism in bzr which shows up some of the downside of Python, you have to
guess the arguments to send the hook. But who needs API documentation when you
can just read the code? :)

Bazaar's main GUI is qbzr (which provides GUIs for individual commands) and
Bazaar Explorer (which provides a complete GUI). I worked with Martin Gz to
make these two talk to the normal Ubuntu crash system, Apport, rather than
showing a nasty crash backtrace to the user.

Then I noticed that Bazzar Explorer has a lot of "Refresh" toolbar buttons about
the place, any time you make a change to the file you have to click one before
the UI will update. Not very user friendly. So I added file watchers about
the place to make it magically update. Nifty, except that after release it
turns out this breaks horribly when doing some commands outside of Bazaar
Explorer, oops. Quick fix and message to packagers, hang head in shame.

The first large feature I worked on was GPG signing of commits. The
documentation for Bazaar promised that this was implemented and all you need do
was set the various options in the config file. Alas it lied. I fixed up the
documentation and started looking into the GPG python bindings, which turn out
to be completely undocumented on the Python side and surprisingly badly
documented on the C side. Security critical code which is badly documented
seems scary to me, mistakes could easily be made which go unnoticed until it
appears on full-disclosure. But I manage to implement signing and adding a GUI
to Bazaar Explorer being cautious as I go.

Bazaar has a scheme called patch pilot where we review patches submitted by the
community and help them on their way to being integrated. I started out with
this by following John Meinel who can write code faster than I can write English
prose. We made small changes to some patches and integrated them, we gave
feedback to newer patches that needed some work and we chased up contributors
who had not responded. The barrier to entry in Bazaar is pleasingly small, if
you don't have the skills to write a perfect patch it's encouraged to say so
and someone else will finish it off.

Why, I wondered, is bzr (the command line UI to Bazaar) not translated? There
were parts of gettext scattered around the code, and some code to extract
strings but it didn't get used. Turns out this code was a half completed
feature that had never been taken to completion. I finished off translations
by adding gettext()s throughout the code, ensuring tests still pass, fix the
installation of .mos and enable the generation of .pot. This missed the 2.4
release so I'm still waiting to see how it works for 2.5, I suspect some
strings will be missing context needed to do a good translation and of course
the occationally technical output of bzr might need some thought on how to
translate but it should make bzr easier to use for non-English speakers.

Ubuntu Distributed Development is the project to put all of Ubuntu's packages
and history into Bazaar branches and change our packages processes to use
Bazaar. This makes a lot of sense, the Ubuntu archive is already a primitive
revision control system (you upload for each new version, often its useful to
look at older versions). This project has been a long time coming and is one
of the original reasons why Canonical started Bazaar back in the day. It
suffers from a number of problems, notably the failure of quite a lot of
packages to import into Bazaar including currently the whole of KDE due to a
patch into openSUSE's bz2 package. Also the quilt patch system we use tends to
clash with being held within a revision control system so you end up with diffs
of diffs. I tend to think that would have been an easier win to import only
the debian/ packaging into Bazaar branches.

I tidied up the new Ubuntu Packaging Guide which is a guide to packaging with
UDD branches (named in the hope that UDD will soon become the definitive way to
do packaging). I also added a new command bzr get-orig-source to make it
easier to do packaging in the current directory rather than a separate
directory as used by bzr builddeb. I also added a hook to set the bzr
changelog from the debian/changelog entry which is the current behaviour with
debcommit. I got mixed feedback on this so I added a config option to disable
it too. I also tidied up some of the bzr-builddeb code by removing weird terms
like "larstiq" and removing acronyms by default.

My Python programming has improved a lot and I'm a convert to the cause of unit
tests. Python is a fun and productive language but the lack of culture for
documenting APIs is disappointing and being dynamic it's that much easier to
make mistakes without realising it. My productivity is nothing like as high as
others on the Bazaar team but it seems I'm better at improving (graphical and
command) user interfaces than my colleagues who can memorise internal data
structures trivially. My six months is now up, I've enjoyed them and now I'm
looking forward to getting back into Kubuntu and KDE.

Ubuntu Developer Summit is happening in cloudy Florida. The Kubuntu team have been busy talking about how to make a rock solid LTS release for Precise Pangolin that can be supported for 5 years. KDE Software is in a good place for this LTS since we are coming towards the end of the long KDE/Qt 4 cycle and it is a stable and mature product.

Other areas we have been looking at are a Kubuntu Active project to bring KDE's touch device software (Plasma Active, Calligra etc) to our users. Some nice Chinese developers popped up on our IRC channel so we had a session on CJK support which is currently broken in KDE and looks like we can get it fixed. The docs will be polished for this release with plans for extra shiny changes in the Q-release. There was a session on improving the filesharing plugin we wrote for Dolphin.

Still to come include sessions on accessibility, Muon Software Centre and a packaging tutorial for some Kubuntu people who want to step up their involvement (yay!)

You can join UDS remotely through the audio streams and IRC channels, see http://uds.ubuntu.com/participate/remote/

There's a strong Qt presense here with a number of sessions to discuss how Qt can work with Ubuntu Desktop and fit into their software better. Interesting development seem to be a Qt Software Centre and a Qt version of Ubuntu One, just now I'm in a session about Qt Quick for designers.

A busy Qt session

Qt Plenary talking about why Nokia (still) needs Qt

Quintasan discovers American culture through Doctor Pepper

Kubuntu's bi-annual UDS hot tub party

Kubuntu 11.10 is out and ready for download. This is the first Kubuntu release were I haven't had much involvement in putting it together and I'm immensly proud of the team who put in so much work.

A word of warning to users, the upgrade to KMail 2 is not smooth, see our KMail 2 upgrade instructions and decide if you want to upgrade.

And today KDE turns 15. An immense achievement for a community creating fun, useful software for consumers. We're bigger and better than ever now encompasing more than desktops with a reach into mobile, tablets and cloud.

I'll give a word of warning here too. I hear quite often at KDE confrences that Ettrich's original goal of a complete consistent desktop was achieved long ago. This isn't the case, we still need a world class web browser, office suite and well see the warning about e-mail above. So plenty more work to be done before we get world domination.

Time for me to wind down Bazaar and move back to my first love, KDE and Kubuntu.

Nice little visual change to qbzr, curves on the diff view..

Before:

After:

Thanks to Iwata Hidetaka.

Being bored of the IRC poll on blogs.kde.org I made a new poll for revision control systems. I'm glad to see that after one vote Bazaar is at 100%.

An LWN article from a few weeks ago talks about Userful Corporation's deployment of Linux in Brazillian schools.

"The Brazil deployment has been rolling out in phases since 2008, and currently includes more than 42,000 schools in 4,000 cities. The base distribution is one created by the Brazilian government, called Educational Linux, which is based on Kubuntu."

Lovely

Bug 83941 Bzr doesn't speak my tongue has been closed. Bzr can now be translated. If you want to help bring bzr to those who prefer to work in non-English languages please help translate at Launchpad (you will need to be in the appropriate Launchpad translations team).

The translation will involve quite a bit of specialist language (what is French for "colocated branch"?) and I expect there are strings yet that need to be added to the translation file. I also need to look at translations for plugins.

Yesterday's App Developer Week talk on Bazaar Explorer went well. See the logs if you missed it.

Tonight I'm giving a real life talk at my old user group Falkirk LUG about Kubuntu and Bazaar.