KDE Release Party Osnabrück and KDE Windows Sprint

Today I arrived in Osnabrück for the 3rd KDE on Windows Developer Sprint. It is hosted in the office of Intevation.
We have quite some things to do:

• What do we want/can we do for KDE frameworks?
• What changes in Qt 5 (in all respects there are)
• Which improvements are needed for our emerge buildsystem
• What improvements are needed for packagers for single app installers?!
• a new buildserver is waiting at intevation too.
• improvements for our own kdewin-installer

Some other nice ideas are floating around as well, we will keep you informed!

For all people near Osnabrück: we plan to do a KDE release party and we want to invite all KDE developers and all Qt developers around to have a nice chat and some drinks in the unikeller.

transqript v0.0.1

Today I want to announce a new Qt application called transqript.
Transqript can be used to bring interviews etc. that have been recorded as an audio file into written text.
Originally I wrote it as a christmas present for my wife since the free-as-in-beer application that was recommended for this task before was only available for Windows (and my wife uses Linux of course). The second point was of course to try out some classes in Qt and have a real life test application for that. Since my wife got a lot of questions regarding transqript I decided to clean the code, add some features and make a real windows installer too. You can download the installer or the sources required to build transqript from the sourceforge page.
Please be aware that transqript is still in a pre-alpha state, that means it looks really ugly and there are bugs in it!.
If you use transqript and you find some bugs, please enter them in the bug tracker. I will try to fix those bugs and I plan to release a new version every 2-3 months.

Have fun with transqript!


Heute möchte ich transqript vorstellen.
Transqript ist gedacht um insbesondere Interviews zu transkribieren die vorher als Audio-Datei vorliegen.
Ursprünglich habe ich es als Weihnachtsgeschenk für meine Frau geschrieben, da die dafür empfohlene Anwendung leider nicht unter Linux verfügbar ist. Da uns viele Fragen nach dieser Anwendung erreicht haben, habe ich sie nun ein bisschen aufgeräumt und stelle sie nun der Allgemeinheit zur Verfügung.
Da transqript noch sehr neu ist, enthält es bestimmt noch einige Fehler die ich aber in kommenden Versionen ausräumen möchte. Falls jemandem Fehler auffallen oder neue Funktionen einfallen, einfach in der Fehlerdatenbank eintragen.

Viel Spaß mit transqript!

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.