Fast, faster, solid.

Our last KDE on Windows release is already a month old, but still we have tons of bugfixes that result in updated packages (to be true, this hasn't been the case for all releases).
Today I just finished uploading several new packages again, including a new kdelibs package which contains a new solid backend. This doesn't really sound to interesting in the first place, so why should you care? Solid works completely in the background and gives your applications the system information it needs, whether this is the number of DVD-Drives and its read speeds, or your battery status or ... This also shows the problem: there is a call to solid each and every time you open a file dialog and in case your solid backend is slow and/or crashes sometimes you can easily see how bad the situation can be.

At the bottom left in dolphin you can see the device list (Geräte) directly taken from solid.

Already since quite some time we thought about improving our current solid backend, but only november Patrick von Reth (TheOneRing) actually started to work on a new backend implementation. Work continued for quite a while, I went to the solid sprint in Brno, and now the biggest part of work is done. So I decided to integrate that work already now, even though we haven't even started to bring this upstream. This will follow soon but given that this might count as a new feature, we might need to wait a while ;-). If you are curious, work has been done in the git branch win-solid-next.

But not only that has happened lately.
Andrius Ribas (Xiluembo) is trying to build KDE on Windows with yet another compiler, the Intel one. Of course this is not to easy, each compiler has a specific behaviour, and of course, specific bugs. A new compiler might not be to interesting for everybody, but it helps us understand how our compilers work, and specifically we are interested in producing OpenMP-code (parallel execution code) which the msvc compiler does not support.

But there is more going on, Ananta Palani (notedible) is fixing bugs for the digikam package (and sometimes has to fight the once I introduced) and I am trying to fix smaller bugs in all KDE applications, I even became top bug killer in commit digest once :-D.

tl;dr: Please update your KDE on Windows packages regularly and get tons of bugs fixes :-D

yokadi on windows

While reading planet KDE a bit I somehow got caught by Aurélien's release announcement for Yokadi, "the command-line driven, geek friendly, sqlite backed TODO list". I was in need of such a tool already for quite some time, and so began to look at it.
First of all Yokadi is written in python using an sqlite database, which is basically the size I was looking for. Also it makes it possible to run also on windows... In the README it says that Mac OS X and Windows should work but haven't been tested and so I started my way through it.

To make it possible for more people to use this application I want to document what I needed to do to get yokadi working on Windows:

1. Install the python setuptools if you haven't done so yet. After the installation you might need to adjust your PATH to include the Scripts folder of your python installation so that the easy_install.exe is included.


2. get pyreadline, sqlobject and dateutils by simply running easy_install[PACKAGENAME]. Make sure you have svn.exe in your path for pyreadline. Except for this requirement, everything went smooth so far.


3. Now get the yokadi sources with git. I needed to add a patch, so make sure this patch is already contained in your yokadi sources. I send this patch to the mailing list and hope it gets committed soon.


4. After you made sure about the patch, run setup.py install from the commandline. This will install yokadi as a python site-package.


5. Set the EDITOR variable if you don't have vi.exe in your path. I installed the commandline version of vim for that: set EDITOR="C:\Program Files\vim\vim72\vim.exe".


6. To not add a HOME variable to my local environment, I made a yokadi.bat which basically sets the environment variable HOME to the directory where I want to store the database (and the history file) and then calls the yokadi python script in the scripts folder.

I haven't tried the yokadid daemon which is supposed to notify you about due dates: both because I don't like such notifications and as well because at least the master version looks suspiciously Unix-only ;-).
So far I am really pleased by yokadi, it matches my way to work (yes I use the windows cmd.exe a lot!) and I hope I can get rid of all those .todo files now :-D.