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.

binaries and a trip to Reykjavik

Right before I will fly for 4 days to Iceland, I finished building recent Amarok and digikam packages and uploaded them to our mirrors. This wouldn't be possible without Christian who devoted more than a complete weekend to fix most of our packages again and now it is there - we reopened the "unstable" releases again with KDE 4.2 beta1 (version 4.1.80).

As a decision, we will from now on try to provide pre-release snapshots of software solely for the unstable part (as some software might be in need of newer versions of libraries anyway), so we currently have digikam beta6 only in 4.1.80 and Amarok in both (for a last time I think).

So if anybody is in Reykjavik area in the coming days (and likes to have a presentation of KDE on Windows or Marble) simply leave a comment...

<update>I didn't say what I wanted to say: Amarok now contains lastfm support in the msvc builds and digikam hopefully can show pictures in the msvc binaries as well.</update>

test the best!

As you might know we're currently fixing all kinds of bugs until the release and this time we even fix the unit tests under windows.
This hasn't been a high priority for us but taking the new cdash-server (thanks Alex!) for kdelibs Christian started to submit some first reports for it. I will follow tonight hopefully and I hope more people will follow, especially on the "other platforms" ;-).

Next I fixed some tests in Marble here on windows and now they run fine at least here. I think I can go over to writing more tests and improving marble even more.

One of the bad things that happened to me is a bug in either subversion or putty: I generated a new ssh key with puttygen and asked sysadmin@ to change it. But commandline subversion doesn't want to use this key now and I am not sure what I am doing wrong. The special problem is that both logging in with putty to svn.kde.org and checkout with TortoiseSVN (with the new key) work. The problem about the key seems to be an irregular length of 2047 vs. 2048 Bits. But probably the only way to solve this issue is to ask sysadmins to change the key again.

The last thing is that slowly but steadily amarok on windows comes back: Pau (pgquiles) is currently investing quite some efforts on it and I hope for the best and for neverending success!

Announcement: Amarok to come

I couldn't believe it - Amarok 2.0 is working on Windows - even though with some severe problems still. It went faster then I believed. So I made a big effort to make a package as fast as possible and now it uploads to my server.

The package isn't really for early adopters - it is just a developer preview.

I hope I can work a bit more on it, to bring at least the part windows uses, into a better shape. But at the same time I still have to do some stuff for university, the other applications are calling as well (I can hear kopete's voice very distinctively) and of course my wife needs more time - it is xmas in two weeks.


So far,
SE