finally 4.7.0

Weeks after we started, we finally managed to get out the KDE 4.7.0 release. Only after TheOneRing asked me several times about a new release (either a last 4.6 release or the 4.7.0 one), I finally gave in and told him what I know about the KDE on Windows release process... We needed quite a while to get most packages building again, very likely because our buildserver was stopped already some months ago due to lack of maintainance time. Also the splitting of the kdeedu & kdegraphics packages had not been done when we did our last release (KDE SC 4.5). But now we added new buildscripts and fixed our packaging scripts so now we welcome more packages to be split up (kdesdk or kdegames perhaps?).

Since I couldn't put everything into the release announcement, I want to add some more stuff over here:

• Our release contains the latest version of Digikam (which is 2.0.0)
• Also, there are now both skrooge and kmymoney available.
• besides the kdepim package, we also ship a beta version of zanshin, a todo application based on akonadi.
• a small but still nice scanning application is skanlite, which just works...
• also contained are Amarok 2.4.3, Kile, Quassel, Konversation, KRegExpEditor and KRecipes.

If you want to have other packages available, ask us and we will try to make that possible. Also, if you are maintainer of an application and you would like to see your application available on windows, we can surely make that happen.

Desktop summit midtime summary

Ok, the first 3 days of desktop summit have passed, I met a lot of old friends, met some new people, looked into some issues in several projects, went to the parties....

One of the things that comes to my mind from time to time is software accessibility, so I heart both the talks of Frederik Gladhorn about Qt accessibility and Peter Grasch about simon, a voice recognition software. He already provides a windows installer (based on KDE on Windows), so now I am trying to integrate simon into emerge so that it can be distributed both within the KDE on Windows installer and with a self contained NSIS installer.

The second thing I looked at was skrooge, I fixed some build errors and so I expect that skrooge will be in the next KDE on Windows release. Which actually also brings me to the next point:

The next binary release is near, at the moment we are preparing the release, update the 3rdparty libraries, cleaning up our buildserver etc. (well, it is mostly TheOneRing doing it - a big thank you over here). In a couple of days we will start again the builds, so binaries will be there in some weeks time too. We are not yet sure which software we package, I will probably announce this again, if you have special wishes, please let us know on our mailing list: kde-windows@kde.org or here in the comments.

update

Nearly half a year after my last blog post I just thought I would share some news with you.
First of all I became father of a cute boy in february - which limits my time (especially for KDE) quite a lot. Because of this I thought about stopping my work for KDE on Windows completely but I couldn't really live without it ;-).
This also means that our build server slowly stopped working in the past months. This is partly due to size constraints (one of the buildprocesses filled its quantum again) and due to a bug in jom which will only happen after quite some time.

One of the questions that comes up quite often is when we will have another binary release. The current plan is to release KDE 4.7.0 more or less together as all the Linux distributions and maybe add another release of KDE 4.7.X later this year.

Another big issue for us is the transition of our emerge build scripts to git. This brings multiple things with it that are no easy-to-solve questions:
At the moment we recommend that you install a svn client (e.g. TortoiseSVN is my personal choice) and checkout emerge. One of the ideas that came up were that we could easily distribute our scripts from now on as a tarballed git repository (and maybe bundle it with git & python executables).

At the moment emerge uses different categories for different minor versions of KDE, e.g. kde-4.X/kdelibs etc. With Git, we want to move that (at least in the future) into branches of emerge; This would make it possible to easily build & develop older versions of KDE without interfering with more up to date KDE builds.

Together with PovAddict, I already started some tests for the git transition (he ran the scripts etc, and I tested it ;-)) but we came across a problem that is probably singular to us:
KDE git repositories do not allow crlf files inside the repo so we need to translate all of our files to lf EOLs on the server. In our checkout, we need to have some files as crlf (think of batch files and patches) and some files as lf only (the python stuff). My guess at the moment is that we should turn

core.autocrlf=false

(which we already do) and at the same time add a .gitattributes file which contains

*.cmd eol=crlf

or something like that (if you have more ideas, please let me hear them).

So far for now, more information, especially on our google summer of code project this year (which is about the kdewin-installer). hopefully later.