For anyone who has been paying any attention of PyKDE5 over the last year or so, it is no secret that development and maintenance has been at a standstill. I've been very busy with a family and small children, and that eats time like you wouldn't believe. (Unit number 2 is almost 6 months now, healthy and happy I can report.) But another important factor is that my interests have shifted towards web related technologies over the last few years.

So, it is time to put the call out for a new maintainer or maintainers. I would also like to put in a bit of an apology to anyone who has depended on PyKDE5 and has had to put up this wishy-washy state of limbo for the project. And I would also like the thank people for the occassional drive-by commit which has helped keep the existing functionality mostly working.

Anyone interested should contact me. I'm willing to help and advise anyone who wants to learn the ropes, and to facilitate a transition to new management. If you are interested and curious but don't want to stick your hand up immediately and commit yourself, then still email me and I can forward on some information to you which may help explain how PyKDE5 works and is updated. It should give you an idea of the task at hand.

I've been steadily chipping away at creating Python bindings for the many libraries which make up KF5. The current list of KF5 libraries which have bindings is:

It was good to make it to the Desktop Summit in Berlin this year and to see some familiar KDE faces again. I feel that I've been able to catch up a bit on news about many of the interesting projects that are happening in our KDE community and also in the greater FOSS desktop community.

This news is perhaps a little bit late, but I can assure you I've been very busy in the meantime. The first day of November Debbie and I were able to welcome our first child to the world, Toby Edwards. We are all very happy. It was a pretty tough labour and result was a health boy who has since been busy growing and stacking on weight. The parenting learning curve is quite steep at the start but I think we're finally getting the hang of managing the baby and sleeping enough.

Thanks to all who suggested first and seconds names starting with Ks and Ds. Maybe next time eh.

To be honest I'm not all that happy with the current situation. Riverbank Computing, basically Phil Thompson, has done an excellent job developing SIP and PyQt over the last 10 years and providing a Free Software (GPL) version which PyKDE is built on. Phil has also done an excellent job of providing answers to my queries, basically as a free service to KDE and the FOSS community. Having two competing Python bindings for Qt is a waste of resources and is generally disruptive to the community at large.

KDE 4.3 is out, I'm vacationed, and now is a good time to explain share same of the things I would like to get done in PyKDE for KDE 4.4.

This year at GCDS I had the pleasure of meeting Gökmen and Gökçen (pronounced “Gerkman” and “Gerkchan” with hard Gees not Jays). They are part of a relatively small team of around 15 developers who are sponsored by the Turkish government work on a Turkish Linux distribution called Pardus. It is a KDE focused distribution which has been around since the end of 2005. What makes this distribution so interesting is the system tools and configuration tools which they've developed based heavily on Python, PyQt and PyKDE.

A small status report about the Python bindings and support in the almost arrived, KDE 4.3. All of the APIs have been updated of course and I've added support for polkit-qt. This makes it possible to write applications and configuration tools which feature the much needed (and working) "Administrator" button.

I'm about 18 months behind the curve here compared to you trend-setters in KDE-land, but I think I now actually "get" git. Meaning that I now have a mental model of git which makes sense and I can use to make sense of the numerous "Git $X seconds" blog posts hanging around on the web (where the number $X is always smaller than the last blogger). I remember sebas having a go at explaining it to me and me not understanding what the big deal was or what it really was about.

Roberto Alsina recently posted a series of tutorials about Python and PyQt on his blog. I don't think they appeared on Planet KDE, so I'm forwarding them on. ;-) It covers typical Qt GUI programming using Qt Designer.

Most of the material is directly relevant if you want to develop KDE applications using Python, PyQt and PyKDE. Some differences of note are: