git web

As you might know I also work on Linux machines from time to time and so I tried to set up a git server on a local machine. After two hours trying to set up gitweb I simply gave up (That costed me a lot of nerdpoints as casper pointed out correctly!). Today I invested another hour into gitweb until I finally came to the conclusion that whoever writes such a bad documentation, doesn't want any users. So I decided to search again for something else:
There are various pages where alternative projects are listed, and after having tried git-php which is either not accessible (probably a self hosted git server) or which doesn't work as well, I finally came across viewgit. ViewGit's claim is 'to be easy to set up and upgrade, light on dependencies, and comfortable to use.'. Which it really is. The point is not only that there exists a rather good documentation in the source code (as you would like to have it), there is a readable README which also tells you what to do and if you try to access it before it redirects you to the README. All in all this is what I wanted & needed - it took me less than 10 minutes to set up. Kudos to the developers.

This is what I expect from open source software. Why is the rest so crappy?

build server web

It is not new anymore that we got a build server which runs windows and regularly builds KDE on Windows. But from now on we have a webinterface for the build server which for now can be found under http://winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/dashboard/ . This means that build results can now be tracked more easily. This goes as far as having the complete logfile for the build available, basically the same you would have if you'd build on your own.

The advent of the web interface also means a second feature I will hopefully set online this weekend: nightly packages which always return the latest state of KDE. And I also have planned some more features: rss feeds for each package & for all packages, a history for each package (so you can check when an error has been introduced, etc.) and of course an improved error searching algorithm (it currently only uses the last 20 lines from the complete log as summary).

And last some pictures: Some of the stuff that doesn't build on the right side is my fault, but of course not everything:

new windows nightly builds and a question about nepomuk on windows

I don't want to make a big announcement out of it, just so you know: I just set up a nightly build server for KDE on Windows in the last days, which is supposed to build all our KDE packages on a regular schedule. Thanks to Qt Development Frameworks for providing the server and especially to Maurice and Danimo.

The server currently comes with a mailing list where broken packages are announced (kde-winbuild) and I hope I can provide a web page soon similar to this one. I hope this will make it easier to see build errors early and will make the life easier here on windows.

One other thing I fell upon is nepomuk and its companions soprano and strigi. Since I was asked about it and I couldn't answer (because I never came accross it!) I decided to take a look at it. The problem I found is that under windows, the indexing part (strigi) is nearly completely disabled - this also makes clear why no errors occur. Which in turn makes also clear that soprano and nepomuk might work, but since there is no index at all, the two do not really seem to make any sense.

So what can we do?

• we could try and fix strigi. This seems like a lot of work, since a lot of the strigi code is written without Qt support - using fork, sockets and some more non-portable stuff.


• we could disable nepomuk and rely on the build-in Windows search - this minimizes the work, which can be spend on other targets (solid, plasma etc.) then.

If by chance the windows developer base increases by a high percentage, we could reenable nepomuk then - or if we have nothing else to do anymore.

Personally I tend to fix strigi, but what do you think?

No more hungry evenings!

Just some minutes ago I got krecipes compiling here under windows - after just a few changes (What else would you expect!). Ok, it crashed because our mysql packages are not the best, I might have to improve those, but with sqlite it worked quite well (though a bit slow).


Just to give a small impression:



To say the truth, I was never really hungry, but perhaps this program makes me cook a bit more often? - Lets see.

Summertime

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, KDE on Windows made another release (only some days after the official release date - it is just me who needed nearly two weeks to blog about it ;-)). We introduced two "new" compilers, first of all Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0 Express Edition and second MinGW gcc 4.4.0. There are still some drawbacks when using MinGW 4, but we hope that we can fix those soon and then we can drop the old gcc 3 series (probably together with KDE 4.4).

Personally I am currently slacking off a bit. Last week I helped my sister to move her flat and at the end of this week I will go back to Iceland for one and a half weeks meeting some friends again. If you're around there, just drop me a note here.

Some days ago I decided to start a long term project of mine and with the help of my mother who is an oracle consultant I installed a small oracle 10g express edition database on my computer. So far we could get it running via both the OCI and the odbc sql-database plugin of Qt and everything seems to be as easy as I can think of. Look forward to some interesting news concerning Marble... ;-).

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.

KDE on Windows is not dead yet

First of all, I want to say something about an article that has been released on the Linux Magazin - about the step down of Christian Ehrlicher as a developer for KDE on Windows.
This is not easy for us as Christian has done quite a lot of work in the background as making packages and fixing builderrors and bugs. This doesn't mean though that he has been the only one to do those tasks. The Amarok Nightlies have been done nearly totally independent of the rest by Björn Schröder and Oluf Lorenzen; in between the releases Christian made, I made some of them too, and also Ralf Habacker and Holger Schröder are able to build packages (those are the ones that currently are allowed to upload, this list can of course be extended). So packages will be provided in the future as they have been in the past.

The second point I want to address is the criticism made by Christian in his post. Although Till has corrected it here and here I do remember that the feelings we had back when kdab joined KDE on Windows development were far more optimistic than what was achieved in the time. I think this is normal and can happen in other places too. I think though that we have to look further and always check what possibilities we do have to work together and how we can achieve the best together. Due to the pure nature of the different intents that companies and private persons do have if they develop on KDE we will never have the exact same opinion on some issues (the packaging is such an issue here). The same applies to probably all companies in this area, just think of Qt Software & Qt.

And last I want to mention something that has struck me again when reading the comments both in Linux Magazin and below Christians blog post: I never want to read again those comments along the line "good that you have found back to the free OS and you no longer waste time". All those of you out there thinking like that, just try to switch on your brain at least once and think why it is called "free" software. It is not free as in beer, it is free as in freedom, and I reclaim hereby the freedom to develop for Windows. And for Linux. And for BSD. And for Solaris. And for Mac. And for all those other OSs I don't even know but which might run KDE one day.