OCT
16
2007

KDE 4 Hacking

Submitted by Cornelius Schumacher

This week is KDE 4 hack week for me and some other colleagues at SUSE. We have thrown in some of our ITO time (that's a certain fraction of our work time we can flexibly spend on innovative projects which aren't necessarily related to our day-to-day jobs) to help making KDE 4 ready for release before the total release freeze comes into effect on Friday. Some of the KDAB folks were attracted by this idea as well and will also chime in and do some serious KDE 4 hacking. So hopefully we will have a well-working KDE PIM in KDE 4. It certainly will be a fun week!

[image:3034 width="640" height="480" hspace=100]

I have a KDE 4 desktop up and running now and am looking at KOrganizer, the project which initially brought me to KDE. It's nice to see how far it has come. The KDE 4 version already runs pretty well, but there a still lots of small glitches and I will spend some time on getting rid of these. Enough blogging, back to hacking now.

If somebody wants to be part of the fun, get your SVN checkout ready and join us on IRC.

Comments

Go, Cornelius, go ;-)

I just checked out KOrganizer, see if I could make a screenshot for the beta 3 announcement, but the newly added multiple timezone stuff isn't finished (you can't see which timezone is which) so I choose not to make a screenshot. It's cool to see you guys work on it to get it usable for 4.0 :D

By superstoned at Tue, 10/16/2007 - 12:18

What great news. Thank you, the other SUSE KDE-devels and a special thanks to KDAB. You are rocking! :)

By Sebastian Sauer at Tue, 10/16/2007 - 14:57

"get your SVN checkout ready"

I would like to, but I have no machine to do the continuous builds.

One reason I chose to run openSUSE-10.2 on this older, 2nd-hand notebook here was the promise the build service seemed to offer with its KDE4 repository.

However, so far not a single week after any upgrade did I see any somehow working KDE4 desktop with plasma widgets on it. Quite a disappointment, I must say. (Not your fault, or anyone else's, let me quickly add, before you or someone starts to feel insulted...) And I made sure to run the KDE4 desktop as a separate "kde4" user, and to delete all of "~/.kde4" and "/tmp/*-kde4/*" and "/var/tmp/*-kde4/*" files after each upgrade before trying a new session.

I've repeatedly made sure to have installed all packages that carry qt4 and kde4 in their name or description.

The only things that worked, somehow, where individual KDE4 apps started on top of my normal KDE3, run as normal user.

But what's the worst, since about 10 days there is no more any new package at all in http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE4/openSUSE_10.2/ -- and this at a point in time where KDE4 development becomes really hot for people who could start beta-testing from a non-dev point of view and help with bug reports and some such... :-(

Anyway, good to see Novell sponsoring you guys to do this goodness on ITO time. :-)

By Kurt Pf. at Tue, 10/16/2007 - 15:59

> after any upgrade did I see any somehow working KDE4 desktop with plasma widgets on it

Plasma is still pretty unmature, don't expect it to work better in our packages than upstream. ;-)

> But what's the worst, since about 10 days there is no more any new package at all in

We disabled synchronizing while packaging the until Thursday unreleased Beta 3 tarballs.

By at Tue, 10/16/2007 - 19:45

Ah. That explains the fact to me. (Not the reasons; what use is the build service in times of 'no-synchro' if its repositores are not accessible? Will a no-sychros state occur for each new Beta or RC or Final release?)

By Kurt Pf. at Tue, 10/16/2007 - 23:01

Please keep in mind that the openSUSE Build Service is still under development and there are not unlimited resources. But of course we hope we can improve it for use cases like yours, so constructive input is certainly appreciated.

By the way, it's cool that you are using the Build Service :-)

By Cornelius Schumacher at Wed, 10/17/2007 - 09:21

I gathered from Beineri's statement that the no-synchro happens because of some kind of 'policy' being applied to times close to official releases (which reasons wouldn't be obvious to me). From what *you* say, it seems more like it happens because of limited resources (which is a reason, of course, more easy to understand).

Well, at least the Build Service yesterday gave me all the new Ghostscript 8.60 goodness, after webpin told me where it was hiding. :-)

By Kurt Pf. at Wed, 10/17/2007 - 10:21

I just hope the rounded edges of the appointment visualization can be disabled...

By carlo at Tue, 10/16/2007 - 22:24