KdeDevelopers, while a helpful site, did not allow for registration-less comments. Since I'd like to use my blog as a means of easily communicating with the community, I've switched to my own self-hosted WordPress blog.

two days after the release of kbfx silk in which we try to simplify the backends and front ends, we got a nice comment on kde-look. actually this was really unexpected.

--
"I really dislike the latest kbfx, I wanted simplicity, that is why I switched to kbfx "

What the solution for bug number #139882 (see also here) could look like...

Bug: number #139882

Background: KDEPrint/kprinter gives CUPS users access to set print joboptions by displaying the respective features as represented in the drivers PPD file. This happens on the "Driver Settings" tab ("kprinter --> Properties").

The tab is divided into two panes: top and bottom. The top pane allows to select/highlight a specific feature (ex: "PageSize"), which makes the lower pane display all available values for the feature (ex: A3, A4, Letter), so the user can select it.

Problem: The lower pane is fixed in height; it can display only 3 items at one time. However, some features do have more than 10 choices, and the scrolling can be very annoying. Even if the dialog is expanded vertically to the full height of the screen, this does not change the height of the lower pane.

Suggested Solution: Make the border between the top and lower pane moveable (make the lower pane resize-able/expand-able).

Estimated Effort: max. 5 lines of code.

Gain: A little bit more usability at this spot of the interface.

I still haven't managed to get sound working on my new HP Pavilion a1320y desktop with Fedora Core 4. Read a lot of suggestions in Fedora Forum without any luck so far.

I eagerly await the delivery of my new baby... err... my new desktop system (the system is a "he" and we've already named him jiffy). According to the FedEx tracker, jiffy will be delivered tomorrow. I'm having the heebee-jeebies waiting to do KDE-development again. Sure the computer is good for email and web surfing and keeping your checkbook, but the real fun is using the computer for software development. I'm sure we all agree with that.

So aKademy 2006 was announced. The date is interesting, as it starts on my birthday. ;-) I wanted to go there, but didn't start any preparation before the final announcement. Now I looked at what do I need to go there. First a plane ticket: it is 220EUR+airport taxes. This is not that bad, and the fact that I don't have to go to the capital city, but I can use another one (where my mother in law lives) is a bonus.

In case you haven't noticed, there's a nice cute little menu in amaroK's playlist which mentions the horrible word "delete". Yes sir, delete, as in "remove completely from your harddisk". The option is side by side with "remove from playlist" option, so loosing your files by mistake is so easy. (nobody reads warnings nowadays, and everyone knows that).


arkimedes:~# apt-get install dbus-qt-1-dev
(stuff skipped)
The following NEW packages will be installed:
dbus-qt-1-dev dbus-qt-1c2 hicolor-icon-theme kdelibs-bin kdelibs-data
kdelibs4c2 libarts1c2 libaspell15 libfam0 libjasper-1.701-1 libnetpbm10
libopenexr2c2 menu-xdg netpbm
0 upgraded, 14 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 19.9MB/21.0MB of archives.
After unpacking 69.5MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?


Ok, I have to investigate. Why does DBUS's Qt bindings want to link to all of Qt?

So I grab the DBUS source code, compile it, do an ldd libdbus-qt-1.so -- to my dismay, it links to libkdecore.so! What gives?

So, upon further investigation into the DBUS build system, I find, much my dismay, the following:

dnl linking to kdecore will give us a bit of help from libtool
if (! kde-config >& /dev/null); then
have_qt=no
else
kdelibs=`kde-config --install lib --expandvars 2>/dev/null`
if test -z $kdelibs -o ! -f $kdelibs/libkdecore.la; then
have_qt=no
else
DBUS_QT_LIBS="$kdelibs/libkdecore.la"
fi
fi


Brilliant. They link to KDE just because KDE links to Qt, and they need Qt. Sheer brilliance. I'm impressed.

(it should be noted that the cvs version of DBUS doesn't have this problem).

So, I submitted a patch to the Debian maintainers (as that's the distribution I use). I'm sure they'll reject it, as they always do.

We've reached an important point: branching the CVS for 3.2. After complaining a little that things didn't went as smooth as they could I've started to work again. Now that HEAD is open and we have a 3.2 branch, it was time to get rid of development branches. So let's merge them into HEAD. I've tried to do is carefully. Made a copy of my local HEAD checkout, merged (using CVS merge) the development branch into that. So far, so good. Compiled, committed that one. Great, it worked perfectly, I only had to fix minor issues. Committed also those ones. According to the kde-cvs mails they went to HEAD. Some minutes later I've changed the formatting of a file and,