a new compiler error

While I am currently trying to get KDE on Windows up to a releasable state again (nearly done ;-)), I found an interesting compiler error with the new Visual Studio version (2010):

...
class Andere;

class Klasse {
    public:
        Klasse() : bc(NULL, NULL){
        }
    private:
        std::pair<Andere*, Andere*> bc;
};
...

Why could the above fail? Right, because NULL is not of type class Andere. (That works on the other compilers we have...)

sprint

Ok, long time no blogpost, but now that we speak about it at our KDE Windows sprint in Osnabrück, I'll try to make up a new blogpost.
Lots of discussions are going on here since a lot of time has passed since the last meeting in 2007, I will try to sum them up in a later point in a dot story.
As you can see from the picture below, the very minute we started the sprint, the sun came out.
Finally after bad preparation from my point we still managed to find together:


back: Patrick Spendrin, Ilie Halip, André Heinecke
middle: Patrick von Reth, Ralf Habacker, Romain Pokrzywka
front: Bernhard Reiter, Andreas Holzammer

Well, since Aaron raised one or two issues, I'll take the time to blog again.

Our primary goal for KDE on Windows is easy installability and a complete and stable KDE on the Windows platform. So the question is - where do we start?

Aaron mentions that our installer seems to be way more complicated than installing Linux and that a simple fire and forget installer is far better for a broader audience.

This is probably true and was already part of some discussions. The task of rewriting the packaging format is also not the biggest part. More tricky is the problem of updating the core package, which would then contain quite a lot of smaller libraries which are now handled by the installer. And the second point is: If you want to install more than one package, you might find a package manager far more convenient (on a side note: it is near to impossible to use the .exe installers as packages from inside the kdewin-installer). This part of course gets less important if you want to install just Amarok or just Digikam.

The second point Aaron brings up is how we see ourselves. Aaron says that it could bring a lot more for KDE if we see ourselves as the ones to deliver the libraries for other application developers and at the same time be our own consumers (in our role as the ones who deliver the applications).

The equivalent model would be the java runtime environment vs. java applications. I have been thinking about this model already for quite a while and it never really has vanished. On the other hand I must say that I think the priority is wrong. Until recently an external KDE application was not compilable out of the box on top of our packages (thanks go to Alex Neundorf for fixing it). A whole lot of shiny new KDE technology has no working backends under Windows (think of solid) or is really unstable (phonon). There are really basic bugs like you cannot copy files from one drive to another (recently fixed in kio_file), and last but not least on a lot of corners you don't have any system integration for your applications (this is somewhat similar problem to the missing backends). Personally I consider those issues far more pressing because I benefit from fixing those issues when using KDE applications.

On a more personal level now as it is already getting late:
One of the funny things is the usage of the word 'we' in and around KDE on Windows. This can have multiple different meanings: All the folks working on Windows (which excludes people not working on Windows), the people that distribute their software via the installer (excluding KDAB which uses a single installer for kontact), and not to forget the 'we' Aaron uses where he includes himself. That there is a difference between the first two has been made obvious here but I think those issues have been solved now more or less. The third 'we' is a general KDE one and sometimes also looks from outside: If 'we' have to change our way of thinking, then it is of course not the 'we' including Aaron who has to do something but the other two 'we'.


Enough ranting for now.

KDE Imaging Sprint

I just wanted to say that I returned home from KDE imaging sprint now and want to say thank you again to our host and the organizer of the event Marcel Wiesweg. We got quite a lot of coding done, some errors in Digikam and the kipi plugins have been fixed on Windows, so it was a really positive sprint. Some fixes are still waiting to be committed. I met some people I didn't knew in person before, which was really interesting too.
So all in all, a good sprint and I am looking forward to next years imaging sprint in France ;-).

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.

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: