KDE Blogs 

As I said below, I just assumed maintainership of Kugar from adymo and have been working on re-integrating his local tree into koffice svn. Well, that is now complete, although there is still a whole lot of work to be done: d-pointifying the library, getting rid of the Qt-only shell, etc, etc. I also have a number of new goals for Kugar including greater control over grouping and sorting, making it easier to embed both the viewer and designer into other apps (dataKiosk and Kexi come to mind) and just general bug fixing and so on. Read More

I've got another suggestion. The best language to write the "./configure" tests in is one that developers are familiar with. I'm thinking C++. We can write the tests in C++, as long as they don't need any special libs, which seems likely. If you can compile with qmake, then that is enough. If qmake doesn't work, then the build system is terminally broken in any case. Read More

So what would the best buildsystem be, according to me? ./configure make make install In case you've been startled, read on. First of all, let's differentiate the system configuration checker (a.k.a. configure) from the builder (a.k.a. make). I don't mind if it is the same tool that does both jobs, but in my mind they are separate things. But I didn't say autoconf and make/automake. The build system has to be described by a simple file. I don't need complex rules to tell my build system that library libfoo is composed of foo.cpp, bar.cpp and baz.cpp. I would much rather see a simple NAME = VALUE based file, as much as possible. So writing a Makefile.am would be best for me. Any complex rules required by the build system (DCOP, kconfig_compiler, kdeinit, --enable-final) would be handled by a backend: a script of some sorts that would parse my simple NAME=VALUE file. This build system would produce simple, concise output when nothing is wrong, along with a progress indicator: Read More

So I made the mistake of reading my email first thing this morning and came across this gem: http://lists.trolltech.com/qt4-preview-feedback/2005-06/thread00567-0.html It made me reflect on how I have come to dislike some users of open source. Personally I am sure Mr. Rice is an nice person, and I would probably have a good time if we went out for a drink, but his email encapsulates the annoying message I hear at every LUG meeting and every Linux show I have the displeasure of attending. They want everything for free, and complain when they have to pay for anything. They fail to even appreciate what developers do out of hobby, or good will. Read More

As you may have noticed, Chris Lee started a blog and a thread on kde-core-devel about KDE's next build system. I was there on IRC when the discussion spontaneously started --- as usual, it must have been someone ranting about automake/autoconf/libtool. Read More

While documenting KOrganizer incident dialogs, I was bugged about some small details. In the spirit of doing something about it instead of complaining, created some mockups to express these ideas. I noticed that you can't select the resource to save the event in the dialog. It seems an important feature to me. Also, the incident description is buried in the end of the dialog. It is hard to know it is even the place to write the description, as there is no label. Here is the original image (correction: this is not the original image, this is a previous mockup. The original image does not have a "Description:" label above the details edit box): Read More

OpenSolaris is here. :-) Check it out, it's really cool.

On Wednesday, we will have our first Open Software Usability Get-Together at the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin. Rationale: There are many OS project members in Berlin, wishing for usability advice. And there is a strong usability scene who might want to contribute to OS projects. So why not starting a monthly get-together to introduce them to each other and encourage a long-term collaboration :-) Read More

I'm ready now to disclose some informations about what M2 is. M2 is a generic systems management and deployment framework for KDE. Over the last weekend, I have evaluated some new idea that may be added to M2. Read More

I've been following Ashley and Richard's conversations about the new Smoke proposal for KDE4 and I have to say it all reminds me exactly why I have grown to loathe bindings. First, let me say that I have loads of respect for both Ashley and Richard as they are extremely talented developers. Both of them helped me enormously with the now discontinued Qt# bindings. With that said, I think KDE bindings developers and enthusiasts are completely missing the mark for a possible future KDE/Qt binding roadmap. Read More