The past six weeks

I don't blog too often, but several things happened during the last month and they are partly related to KDE as well. And as there is a short dot story now available, I would like to share something about the background of the story. The KDE part starts with the old idea of merging Quanta and KDevelop. The idea is not revolutionary: both are IDE's, both are using some kind of MDI (KMDI), both offer similar functions, only the target audience and the supported languages are different, altough both have PHP support. The first idea was to make Quanta use KDevelop's plugins. It turned out that in order to do so, we would need to rewrite KDevelop. So Jens came with the idea of making KDevelop plugins from Quanta's functionality. Good idea. We first talked about it last year at aKademy. After that almost nothing happened, everybody was busy with his own task. But we (and mostly Jens) did not forgot about this idea and some months ago he started to port the Project Views functionality to a KDevelop plugin. Slowly I joined the porting and we had some plugins working inside KDevelop. But things were slow, so he invited me to go there to Cambodia to work together. 6 weeks for me there would be just too long and even with support from the e.V. it would be expensive. Again, he came up with another idea: he has time to come here and work on Quanta. This was a great idea and we did as he said. We've been preparing with my wife to host Jens in our small house, which was partly without furniture. But with the help of our parents we managed to bring it in a shape that we can host somebody for a longer period. Oh, not only one, but two: we got a cat meantime. ;-) We started here first to identify the plugins we would like to create, try to find the limitations of the current KDevelop framework and finally to code the plugins one by one. We had lots of ideas and did not know how much we can implement in this timeframe. Now looking back I had mixed feelings: we did a lot of work, much more than we could do if we were not here together, but of course I feel that progress could have been even better if things evolve differently here. But about this later. 6 week continuous coding is hard. At least it is not for me. So aside of coding we wanted to visit the country as well, especially the mountains. Again, I find that we could have been better, but again, this was mostly out of our control. On the first weekend we wanted to climb a nice, but hard mountain. Well, it rained, so we went to visit the county, mostly the numerous mineral water springs (there are a lot - for free) and a volcanic lake that's nearby. After all, this was nice. After the first full week coding my wife went on vacation, so we decided to go to a nice mountain area in the west of Romania. We've been there once and I wanted to go back again. The mountain is not that high, but has several caves, interesting forms and things that you cannot really see in other places (of Romania), like a disappearing river in the ground. It flows down into the earth at several places, just like the water in a bathtube. On our way to the mountain we visited my grandfather as well, who was very sick. Well, the mountain is still beautiful, even if the weather was rainy the days while we've been approaching it, it became nice on the first day when we slept there. Everything looked perfect, but I got sick. So I couldn't really enjoy the trip. And my wife and Jens go sick as well after. I think we had some kind of food poisoning or other stomach infection. :-( So I have to go back again there to enjoy it... It was also not that nice that I broke my digital camera there what I got from Eric at aKademy. On our way back we visited again my grandfather, whom health situation was worse and worse every day. After some days of working, we were preparing to go to the KDevelop conference in Ukraine. I already had the visa and the ticket, but mainly due to the problems with my grandfather, I did not go there. Jens went alone there. I was amazed that he does it, as he had to take a bus to a city from where the train stop, find the train station there, go to another country where people don't really speak English and even the letters are different... But it was OK. Reports about the conference were already posted here. Regarding our work, he discussed some problems we have identified and moved the project views functionality into KDevelop's existing File List plugin, so everybody can enjoy in the next KDevelop release. Just before the conference was over, my grandfather died. I had the time to take Jens from the city (this time he did not have to take the bus as my car was repaired) and next day I went to the funeral. This was a weekend, and he stood at our house taking care of the cat. So things were busy until this time and I was not so happy. I just waited for the phone call when my father announces the death of my grandfather and this was stressing. I also had a lot of things to do at the city library as I am working part time there as a network administrator. I even installed some months ago an LTSP network for free internet access. Of course, the terminals run KDE. It was amazing that people can work on it without real training and some even configured Kopete for chatting by themselves. But this time the job was boring: install and configure several Windows machines... After the funeral of my grandfather coding progress was very good. Well, the truth is that we started in the morning (9-10AM) and sometimes went to bed at 2-3AM during the night... I could say that Jens could stay up for a longer period. ;-) My wife was the first who gave up, and sometimes I simply couldn't wait until we both stop to work, but went to bed. During this time we ported many functionality of Quanta into the newly created plugins. So now the code is somewhat usable. You should not search for everything that was in Quanta, some areas are still unfinished, but it can be used. And hopefully it does not crash. Some functionalities are even improved compared to the one that is in Quanta 3.x. In our TODO file there is a list of missing items, the most important would be VPL. We want to have a clear VPL implementation which does not need hacks everywhere in other parts. One way could be to use KDOM as a storage for our internal node tree. We wanted to work on this as well, but did not have the time. So the current parser still creates our own node tree, but the code is more separated than before, and slowly we reach the point where we can try to use KDOM. The fact that we did not really work on parser is one of the reasons I said that we could do more. Maybe not in 6 weeks (from which 1 week was the KDevelop conference) though. Other missing item is the debugger, but as Linus works heavily on support for XDebug for Quanta 3.5, we did not want to start porting the current implementation. I don't want to spend too many words explaining the details of the new Quanta. They are more or less explained in our DESIGN file and anybody having questions can find us on the quanta-devel list. As I said we wanted to visit some places here as well. But the weather was playing tricks with us. It rained a lot, we had only a few days with sunshine and usually not on weekends. It rained so much here that the country experienced flooding like never before. It started during spring in the west (the water is still there), but now the problems were mostly on the east. Most of the roads between Transylvania and Moldova are damaged. That road as well that I used to get Jens from the train station to our home... One weekend we tried our luck and climbed a mountain. We got some small rain, but it was OK. Only that the boots of Jens did not survive the trip. The lower part started to separate from the rest already on the first trip, but I took to a repair service and they glued back. Well, it was good for half of the next trip. This incident and the fact that we had only one more weekend left lowered the chance to visit the higher mountains. And yes, next weekend the weather was again cloudy. So we visited a castle (the "Dracula" castle, altough it's connection with the Romanian prince called Vlad Tepes - known as Dracula, altough he was not a vampire... - is only vague. The castle was under his father's (? I'm not exactly sure about this) control for 35 years or so. But the Dracula myth is good for tourism: the village is full with tourists from Romania and abroad. As the weather started to became better, we went to the base of another mountain (the first one we wanted to climb weeks ago) and walked a little there in the forrest. As we prepared to live, the clouds disappeared and it was visible that the next day will be beautiful. So was it, since that day it is sunshine and high temperatures (30C and above, compared to the other days when sometimes it was only 15C). While we've been going to Bucharest to the airport, my heart was crying as I saw the clear and sunny mountains. So we went to Bucharest, experienced some traffic jam, hot air and crowed and after that Jens flew away. He should be at home at this time, ~22 hours after he left Romania. Here we are today, I still did some work on kdevquanta (or Kuanta, however you like it), but I should focus on Quanta 3.5 now. And I should go to the mountains on this weekend as the weather reports say that we will have sunshine during the next days. The target is a 2-3 days trip in the highest (2544m) and longest (70km) mountain in Romania. Of course, we will visit only a small part of it.