Just some minutes ago I uploaded the first patches for windows packages for the first KDE 4.3 release candidate.
If you start the installer, you might find that the list of packages has grown quite a bit. This is for two reasons: first of all Ralf and I currently try out splitting the kde modules into subpackages, so that you can simply install e.g. Okular, without having to install kolourpaint (nothing against kolourpaint!). This will make it more obvious which applications you install and close a long waiting wish in KDE's bugzilla.
The second reason is that the number of packages has really grown: I added a (rather dirty) patch so that konsole can be build under windows, and this of course leads to some new features: kate, konversation, yakuake and kdevelop use the konsolepart to embed konsole into their applications. This is a long awaited feature I wanted to have, and I am pretty sure both code quality (so that I can commit the changes) and the number of windows specific bugs in it will improve in the next months.
Besides the packaging process, Ralf is also working on some improvements to our 'emerge' build scripts. He has nearly finished restructuring them completely. This will greatly improve the overall quality and will make those scripts more extensible and easier to fix in the future.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Monday, June 8, 2009
KDE on Windows is not dead yet
First of all, I want to say something about an article that has been released on the Linux Magazin - about the step down of Christian Ehrlicher as a developer for KDE on Windows.
This is not easy for us as Christian has done quite a lot of work in the background as making packages and fixing builderrors and bugs. This doesn't mean though that he has been the only one to do those tasks. The Amarok Nightlies have been done nearly totally independent of the rest by Björn Schröder and Oluf Lorenzen; in between the releases Christian made, I made some of them too, and also Ralf Habacker and Holger Schröder are able to build packages (those are the ones that currently are allowed to upload, this list can of course be extended). So packages will be provided in the future as they have been in the past.
The second point I want to address is the criticism made by Christian in his post. Although Till has corrected it here and here I do remember that the feelings we had back when kdab joined KDE on Windows development were far more optimistic than what was achieved in the time. I think this is normal and can happen in other places too. I think though that we have to look further and always check what possibilities we do have to work together and how we can achieve the best together. Due to the pure nature of the different intents that companies and private persons do have if they develop on KDE we will never have the exact same opinion on some issues (the packaging is such an issue here). The same applies to probably all companies in this area, just think of Qt Software & Qt.
And last I want to mention something that has struck me again when reading the comments both in Linux Magazin and below Christians blog post: I never want to read again those comments along the line "good that you have found back to the free OS and you no longer waste time". All those of you out there thinking like that, just try to switch on your brain at least once and think why it is called "free" software. It is not free as in beer, it is free as in freedom, and I reclaim hereby the freedom to develop for Windows. And for Linux. And for BSD. And for Solaris. And for Mac. And for all those other OSs I don't even know but which might run KDE one day.
This is not easy for us as Christian has done quite a lot of work in the background as making packages and fixing builderrors and bugs. This doesn't mean though that he has been the only one to do those tasks. The Amarok Nightlies have been done nearly totally independent of the rest by Björn Schröder and Oluf Lorenzen; in between the releases Christian made, I made some of them too, and also Ralf Habacker and Holger Schröder are able to build packages (those are the ones that currently are allowed to upload, this list can of course be extended). So packages will be provided in the future as they have been in the past.
The second point I want to address is the criticism made by Christian in his post. Although Till has corrected it here and here I do remember that the feelings we had back when kdab joined KDE on Windows development were far more optimistic than what was achieved in the time. I think this is normal and can happen in other places too. I think though that we have to look further and always check what possibilities we do have to work together and how we can achieve the best together. Due to the pure nature of the different intents that companies and private persons do have if they develop on KDE we will never have the exact same opinion on some issues (the packaging is such an issue here). The same applies to probably all companies in this area, just think of Qt Software & Qt.
And last I want to mention something that has struck me again when reading the comments both in Linux Magazin and below Christians blog post: I never want to read again those comments along the line "good that you have found back to the free OS and you no longer waste time". All those of you out there thinking like that, just try to switch on your brain at least once and think why it is called "free" software. It is not free as in beer, it is free as in freedom, and I reclaim hereby the freedom to develop for Windows. And for Linux. And for BSD. And for Solaris. And for Mac. And for all those other OSs I don't even know but which might run KDE one day.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
4.2.2
For those of you who haven't yet been aware of it: Christian made new 4.2.2 packages. I added packages for digikam (0.10.0 release), kipi-plugins (0.2.0 release), konversation4 (yet unreleased snapshot) and thanks to Ralf's porting also k3b (another yet unreleased snapshot). Please do not file bugs against k3b and konversation4 yet, we want to fix the obvious errors first.
Those packages are all built against Qt 4.4.3, meaning that you can't build current amarok and the koffice release candidate against it. I am planning to make some trunk packages(against Qt 4.5) though to fix this problem.
In marble I just recently could merge my geodata-nt branch which took a great burden off of me. Now all GeoDataObjects can be copied around, some of them are implicitly shared even. As this comes together with changing the (not-yet stable) API from Pointers to references, some work is still needed (it currently is far to slow to be released...). "please do not hit me for marble being a bit slower now!" ;-)
Those packages are all built against Qt 4.4.3, meaning that you can't build current amarok and the koffice release candidate against it. I am planning to make some trunk packages(against Qt 4.5) though to fix this problem.
In marble I just recently could merge my geodata-nt branch which took a great burden off of me. Now all GeoDataObjects can be copied around, some of them are implicitly shared even. As this comes together with changing the (not-yet stable) API from Pointers to references, some work is still needed (it currently is far to slow to be released...). "please do not hit me for marble being a bit slower now!" ;-)
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Context & Trash
It has been a long time since my last blog post and this has been due to me having exams and starting to work for some weeks in Darmstadt. This also explains why package delivery is rather slow at the moment since only Christian is working on it.
He also made some other progress - he worked on the windows implementation of the KDE trash bin. So now if you look at the KDE trash bin on windows, it contains all the files you find in the windows trash bin and reversed. And best is that features like undelete work too (Christian has spend two days only to make this one feature work!).
Myself I have started a great thing too: the explorer context menu that Carlo Segato committed into svn is supposed to work for all KDE applications in the best way: clicking on a pdf document would make it display "Open with Okular", clicking on ogg files would make it use "Open with Amarok" and so on, all depending on the preferred application you set in your KDE install.
I am already pretty far with this feature but at the moment I have a severe problem: When I try to link the contextmenu plugin against kdecore library, it can't be registered with regsvr32 anymore - I get an error message stating: "LoadLibrary('D:\\KDE\\bin\\kdecm.dll') failed - invalid access to memory location". Registering it by hand does work though. So now I wonder what might be the problem at all because this already happens if I just put in a tiny KUrl which does not do anything in the default constructor. I don't seem to find what is the problem there - so if anybody knows where the problem is...
He also made some other progress - he worked on the windows implementation of the KDE trash bin. So now if you look at the KDE trash bin on windows, it contains all the files you find in the windows trash bin and reversed. And best is that features like undelete work too (Christian has spend two days only to make this one feature work!).
Myself I have started a great thing too: the explorer context menu that Carlo Segato committed into svn is supposed to work for all KDE applications in the best way: clicking on a pdf document would make it display "Open with Okular", clicking on ogg files would make it use "Open with Amarok" and so on, all depending on the preferred application you set in your KDE install.
I am already pretty far with this feature but at the moment I have a severe problem: When I try to link the contextmenu plugin against kdecore library, it can't be registered with regsvr32 anymore - I get an error message stating: "LoadLibrary('D:\\KDE\\bin\\kdecm.dll') failed - invalid access to memory location". Registering it by hand does work though. So now I wonder what might be the problem at all because this already happens if I just put in a tiny KUrl which does not do anything in the default constructor. I don't seem to find what is the problem there - so if anybody knows where the problem is...
Sunday, February 1, 2009
konsolidated
After a long time of waiting for it, I finally tried to port konsole. This was a long awaited application which is supposed to be rather useful for developers (which are currently our main target users). I am still trying to cleanup the patch and getting it into a usable shape to be committed into KDE svn. Also there are still some more problems that will stay for now:
For both there is no colored output available yet.
The biggest problem though is that the konsole window can't be made transparent ;-).
To prove it, here is a screen shot:
Just another great application has been added in a porting branch into svn recently: konversation. And as _Brandon_ hasn't been lazy altogether, konversation4 already works like a charm here. You should be aware that although konversation does more or less work and it gets better and better every hour thanks to a number of people, it should not be used yet and no bug reports should be filed yet.
Some more screenshots here for those who don't believe:
- for cmd.exe many keys do not work, especially delete, backspace and the arrow keys (so no command history yet). I am not sure how to do this yet, probably this needs some more internal changes.
- for sh.exe it seems that at least the backspace key is working, but there is no output of the prompt and ls has some strange output too.
For both there is no colored output available yet.
The biggest problem though is that the konsole window can't be made transparent ;-).
To prove it, here is a screen shot:
Just another great application has been added in a porting branch into svn recently: konversation. And as _Brandon_ hasn't been lazy altogether, konversation4 already works like a charm here. You should be aware that although konversation does more or less work and it gets better and better every hour thanks to a number of people, it should not be used yet and no bug reports should be filed yet.
Some more screenshots here for those who don't believe:
Monday, January 12, 2009
pre-release sprint
As KDE 4.2 release is also coming near on windows, I need to give a short overview of what we have planned for the release so far:
A very unstable part but yet really interesting is plasma. We managed to replace the existing windows shell with plasma (these settings will go into the Platform kcm as well but will be disabled for now) but since some more important plasmoids (especially systray and tasklist) are still missing, that is really experimental ;-). Most work on Plasma is done by _Brandon_ and zbenjamin.
On the Marble side we also have some fine features to release. Maps can now load up custom kml files at the start, the map painting got even more efficient and startup times have been lowered as much as we could.
If you use the marblewidget in your application, you can have multiple marble widgets and they can safely work together. Even though digikam already does this for quite some time I just recently found out that the implications are bigger than expected - but these issues should be fixed now.
The rest of the marble related changes will hopefully be within a proper change log or in a new post of Torsten Rahn.
This blog post is also in memoriam of my old desktop which served me quite some years now and in the last months served as my build computer for KDE packages. He is now pining for the fjords, pushing up the daisies, he is an ex-buildserver (scnr). The release packages are done by Christian though, so you don't have to fear about the release. If some other packages will need a bit longer, please excuse me though - I am already searching for a new solution...
- the KDE systemsettings will come to windows; they can be integrated into Microsoft Windows Control Panel as well.
- KDE/Oxygen Wallpapers and Cursors will be available for Windows as well.
- all platform related settings can be made in a new KCModule called 'Platform'. It can be found in the systemsettings and is made by Eduard Sukharev (kraplax).
- there is some support for spellchecking
- many improvements especially about security and download checking have been made to the kdewin-installer, thanks to Ralf again for it
A very unstable part but yet really interesting is plasma. We managed to replace the existing windows shell with plasma (these settings will go into the Platform kcm as well but will be disabled for now) but since some more important plasmoids (especially systray and tasklist) are still missing, that is really experimental ;-). Most work on Plasma is done by _Brandon_ and zbenjamin.
On the Marble side we also have some fine features to release. Maps can now load up custom kml files at the start, the map painting got even more efficient and startup times have been lowered as much as we could.
If you use the marblewidget in your application, you can have multiple marble widgets and they can safely work together. Even though digikam already does this for quite some time I just recently found out that the implications are bigger than expected - but these issues should be fixed now.
The rest of the marble related changes will hopefully be within a proper change log or in a new post of Torsten Rahn.
This blog post is also in memoriam of my old desktop which served me quite some years now and in the last months served as my build computer for KDE packages. He is now pining for the fjords, pushing up the daisies, he is an ex-buildserver (scnr). The release packages are done by Christian though, so you don't have to fear about the release. If some other packages will need a bit longer, please excuse me though - I am already searching for a new solution...
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Okular
As I already said, I wanted to work a bit on okular again and I am nearly done now.
Today and yesterday I added support for djvu-files and for Microsoft's Compressed HTML Help (chm) to okular. For both libraries there are now two patches for making them build with CMake ;-).
The library of djvu seems to work fine, chm has some problems with zooming though. I am not sure whose problem this is, but definitely that will need a clear head so I won't look at it now.
Another new feature will follow tomorrow: I asked my distro to package libopenjpeg for me and that guy was really nice and will make the openjpeg packages available tomorrow. Right after that I will follow with new poppler packages I think.
For all those waiting already, I am planning to make up a tutorial of how you can easily build a custom CD with your favourite KDE on Windows applications so that they are installable on their own.
Today and yesterday I added support for djvu-files and for Microsoft's Compressed HTML Help (chm) to okular. For both libraries there are now two patches for making them build with CMake ;-).
The library of djvu seems to work fine, chm has some problems with zooming though. I am not sure whose problem this is, but definitely that will need a clear head so I won't look at it now.
Another new feature will follow tomorrow: I asked my distro to package libopenjpeg for me and that guy was really nice and will make the openjpeg packages available tomorrow. Right after that I will follow with new poppler packages I think.
For all those waiting already, I am planning to make up a tutorial of how you can easily build a custom CD with your favourite KDE on Windows applications so that they are installable on their own.
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