Tuesday, July 7, 2009

KDE 4.3rc1

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.