KDE Blogs 

Some time before KDE 3.0 David Jarvie, the author of KAlarm, asked me some questions about the KOrganizer alarm daemon. I answered that it would be a great thing, if KOrganizer and KAlarm could share the same daemon, because I thought that by eliminating redundancies development would become easier and we could use our development resources more efficient. So we imported KAlarm into the KDE CVS and David did a great job implementing the code needed for sharing the daemon. The result was that we had a new application and the shared daemon in KDE 3.0. So far so good... Read More

Now that the first dust about the first beta is settled, my thinking of how to continue gets more and more in foreground. Bug fixing continues at a nice rate, but there are still some show stopper bugs that were fine for beta1, but are not for whatever comes after: flash content missing (bug:65868 ) quite some khtml regressions, that show up on quite some pages (e.g. bug:66490, there are others) kwin hides cookie windows (and korganizer even windows) because of focus stealing prevention These bugs _have_ to be fixed, there is no way around it. But in general there are of course the two golden rules of releases: you'll never get it right whatever you fix, it might break other things (it might be they have downsides originally - I forgot then :) Anyway, I think if just the right ten bugs are fixed, we could release tomorrow. If - in reality we might end up with another beta before christmas and the final somewhere in june ;(

So, finally KOrganizer's bug count got down from almost 95 bugs in July/August to 44 right now. The last few weeks I was really busy producing patches at quite a rate. But every time I tested a patch, I ran into the next bug, and then the next, and so on. But I think, korganizer is really getting into shape now for the KDE 3.2 release. As far as I'm concerned, all the important issues are resolved / fixed (I don't know about Cornelius, and he's the maintainer of korganizer, so this list is only "unofficial"): The resource calendar replaced the file based system korganizer had in previous releases, so each user now has his very own system-wide calendar consisting of parts from several sources (birthdays, files, shared network calendars etc). I really think this resource framework is one of the best things that could happen to kdepim... Whoever is responsible for this (Cornelius?) really deserves an award and a spot in KDE's hall of fame! Alarm daemon works again with the resource calendar (due to Cornelius' work) KOrganizer's printing system got a lot more options than it used to, and it was factored into separate classes, so KDE 3.3 will get a print plugin system. Then it will be able to easily extend the available print styles by a simple plugin which implements your own style. The resource calendar now uses the correct time zone. Journals now also work with the resource calendar. KOrganizer should now work with all foreign encodings (it uses kind-of-utf8 as specified in the rfc 2445), also for group scheduling. I just submitted that patch this morning, so if something breaks on your next kdepim update (in particular on systems with non-western locale), I'm the one to blame (please also tell me about such problems so we can fix them). I also implemented moving multi-day items (items with a time range that go over midnight) in agenda view. There is still one little crash in there, which I need to resolve before the release... Read More

This didn't seem to work first time, so I'll try again: I did a major reorganisation of the code just before the freeze hit. This caused a lot of breakage (eg. the wrapper classes were borked, as was KPart support), fortunately things are working again now. One important change is the use of separate classes to handle proxies for QVariant types and opaque pointers, this makes the code a hell of a lot easier to understand. Now that the structural stuff is done, Ian Geiser's SQL bindings seem to be basically working (though the QObject wrapper class needs a couple of bugs squashing) so the only thing that's left actually broken is the QPainter wrapper class. All in all, this code is looking good for the 3.2 release. Read More

It seems we're coming close to a new release. When? Dunno, just give time to time for bugfixing. Krecipes 0.4 has quite a few additional features, so we cannot hold the beast anymore on the servers. Someone will have to download it soon before it explodes! Read More

okay so my old visor prism is starting to show its age... its big its bulky and after owning two newtons before that, its cumbersome to use... so im shopping. Read More

i'm having a coding frenzy at home at the moment while waiting for my adsl to be installed. amazing the amount of work you can get done when irc, mail and even sane tv listings are all unavailable. Read More

Last night I did a lot of bug fixes and janitor work on bugs.kde.org and others were also working hard to get some stuff done before the string freeze that hits us as of today. Still we (#kde-pim) realized that we are not quite there, which is why we will most probably release Kontact as version 0.8 with the following features disabled: Read More

The skinny: two people have reported that KStars will not compile for them; both are using Redhat 9 and gcc 3.2.2. The error message is: lx200classic.cpp:29: structure `eqNum' with uninitialized const members Read More

Today news sites repeated the monthly Microsoft execute says "Linux is insecure" articles. And while they are comparing apples with oranges (as Linux distributions ship with far more servers and network services than Microsoft offers), it's hard to deny the fact that Linux is also insecure. Essential and security critical packages like OpenSSH, LSH and OpenSSL had exploits in the last weeks and this should have convinced the last conservatives that it is not possible to write a complex server in C without having a remote exploit per year. All these exploits were caused by manual memory management that is relatively hard to avoid in C. But that's not even the point that I want to make, you can also have security problems in other languages. What free software (and also the proprietary competition mostly) lacks is a way to make securing your computer easy. Read More