wireD ATTITU.DE

It took a long time to setup, but now we have new ways of doing Coverity builds available. Instead of waiting for Coverity to fix the build or remote-debugging the build setup by uploading logfiles to our site and analyzing them, I can do the builds myself now and trigger the analysis using the collected data by uploading them to Coverity.

The scanner compiles a lot more code now as I build them as part of the KDE Dashboard. Currently are about 1000 new unscreened warnings, have fun looking through them. I'm looking at them as well as time permits.

Akademy 2008 was a blast, I enjoyed my time there very much. It felt just perfectly organized, so big thank you to all of you who helped to make it happen. It was running very professional with very very few (if any at all) noticeable glitches. I think our biggest issue was the it's own success: all the events were fairly crowded

As I didn't find time to actually get something done during Akademy, I've spent yesterday on catching up with long overdue sysadmin tasks, which included to upgrade one of our core servers to a software state which isn't 4 years out of date. Unfortunately the new database didn't really like to be treated by bugzilla anymore the way it used to be, so after the successful upgrade I ended up with a nonworking bugs.kde.org installation.

Luckily, Matt Rogers and myself have already prepared a new bugzilla installation on a test system for the last year or so, so out of the two possible options of debugging and fixing our outdated buzilla installation to work again with the new database and the switch to the new bugzilla I chose the latter. It has the drawback of causing some regression pain in the near future, but we finally have a much easier to maintain setup that we can upgrade with newer features easier than the old version. The new version for example allows many of the custom features that we added before via patches to be configured out of the box. Configuration is always better than Customisation, so thats a really good thing that I'm very happy about.

Currently we have quite some quirks yet to go through and to sort out, but things should be working much better than before quite soon, and I'm confident that we get that done. I need some help with the web template to add some useful grouping, colors, icons and other basic layout stuff to make it at least somewhat useable again. Contact me if you're interested. Helping hands are more than welcome.

Not enough time for writing up all the interesting things that happened the last few weeks, but important things have to be done anyway:

Another even calendar week means, that means: another KDE IRC Community meeting (Yay!). Currently we're still a bit burned out from the openSUSE 11.0 release partying, but this is the list of topics we came up with so far:

• old action items
• KDE repository splitting (remove :Extra-Apps?)
• KDE3 to KDE4 migration for openSUSE 11.1
• Add your ideas to http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/Ideas for 11.1.

If you're interested, please join us at #opensuse-kde on irc.kde.org.

Stephan Binner's openSUSE KDE 4.1 Alpha1 Live has been uploaded and is there for you to try. It is the first real release of the KDE 4.1 branch after almost 45000 commits and is the result of 4 months of steady KDE development. It has rough edges, but it is a nice preview of things shaping up to become usable and ready for the KDE loving user. It has almost no openSUSE customizations, so any bug you see there is probably worth a bugreport. Visit the KDE 4.1 Alpha1 Info Page for source download instructions and links to binary packages available for installation as we know of.

One thing I really like with Qt4: It is so damn easy to interact with DBus. Just with a couple of hours of playing, I was able to write a small KDE4 based PolicyKit authentication agent:

Of course the dialog looks a bit clumsy, and it is not based on KPasswordEdit (which I just learned about..) and it is not yet installing itself as a kded service module so that it is available all the time, but it is a start. The code is in playground/base/PolicyKit-kde if you want to look.

Another week with lots of new work to do. Last week I didn't find enough time to finish a new 4.1 snapshot, so I did one this week. Unfortunately the openSUSE Build Service had some problems with its popularity, so it did not yet finish building the packages. They're in the build queue though, and I hope they will be done somewhen later today. I've spent some more time on updating Qt packages, so it is also quite busy rebuilding everything that depends on it.

I've made 4.0.3 packages yesterday and tagged them in SVN. It looks like the very-last-minute plasma backports could have caused some new regression that we're not aware of yet, so I'd urge anyone who compiles from SVN anyway to check out /tags/KDE/4.0.3/ and give it a good amount of testing. We do want a good and stable release. I'll be glad to hear about your concerns and more important, SVN revisions against /branches/KDE/4.0 that must be included in the release. Oh, the current KDE 4.0.3 tag is roughly SVN revision 790918. So any commits older than that are already in . BTW - openSUSE packages of 4.0.3 will appear fairly soon like usual via the KDE:KDE4:STABLE:Desktop repository for you to download and try.

Weekly round of quickies:

• Initial KDE4 port of the opensuse-updater started and available for testers in the KDE:KDE4:STABLE:Extra-Apps repository. It is currently not installed by default via the 'KDE 4 Default' pattern, as I first have to talk with the maintainer and make sure that it does not break your system. Feedback is appreciated though, the sooner the kinks are ironed out the sooner we can switch to it for openSUSE Factory. Note that openSUSE-Updater is not really openSUSE specific anymore, there is a PackageKit backend coming up, which means that it will then run and work fine on any decent Linux distribution.
• The new KDE 4.1 weekly snapshot was finally released yesterday. It took me much more time than usual because there were some build system issues to be fixed first, and then I run into an unstable phase of /trunk where kuiserver was refactored. Anyway, r785500 compiled fine and seems to start up, so thats what it is, and it is 3000 revisions more than the last snapshot. Development speed is truly amazing these days. I know that plasma has improved, but there are surely lots of other nice things hidden in there, so check it out!
• The video recordings and slides from the openSUSE dev room at FOSDEM2008 are finally up: http://en.opensuse.org/FOSDEM2008. You'll find some openSUSE KDE 4 slides there as well as many other interesting talks. Have a look there

At one day, there was a patch. The patch was small and in early development, and it was posted to the Plasma review board. A couple of minutes later, the patch was rejected. Many reasons were given: The patch didn't have the right intention, it would cause bitrod, and it broke the coding style. Not a big thing, this happens every day in a Free Software Environment. Neither something to get excited about nor something to loose hair over it.

Thats the end of the story? Not quite, in the bible it took 7 days as well, right?. So lets look at it a bit more closely. Day one: The review said that the patch contained a coding style error. Of course the review didn't mention where the coding style error was, or even better, on how to fix that (didn't the review board have this awesome patch annotation feature?). It is a quite obvious way to motivate a possible new contributor by giving him constructive feedback on how to improve his patch. Not a big deal? Not a big deal. However, as it was mentioned as the last point in a long rambling did make it smell a little bit like "Even if you manage to fix all the flaws mentioned before, have fun figuring out how you make me like the arrangement of spaces in your patch!".

There was Day, and there was night. 2nd. Day. Now.. where was I? Ah right, light!.. eh Plasma! So, the patch had its intention to hide the Plasma toolbox from the KDE 4.0.x desktop. The KDE 4.0 desktop was released in January in its first stable release, intended for early adopters. It was expressed quite clear that it is not finished yet ,and the adequate set of features will come with KDE 4.1. So what would be more obvious to highlight the pure beauty and new shininess of KDE 4.1 by introducing a feature-complete plasma toolbox with KDE 4.1? I spend my second day thinking about this.

There was Night, and there was Day. 3rd Day. Lets enjoy some quote from the review:

you can, of course, put this patch in your downstream builds. you'll be doing the project a disservice, however. or are we not actually developing software in the open anymore but only delivering a final product and therefore completely avoiding the entire feedback cycle?

A couple of things to notice: The patch wasn't posted by a distribution, it was posted by a KDE developer. It does sound strange that a normal KDE developer is suddenly downstream and only Plasma developers are upstream, but this is how it was communicated. Ah, you're saying that I'm ironic and that I know that in my other live I'm also a distro guy? Fair enough, I should have known that. Obviously I cannot be two persons at the same time. And of course I'm doing a disservice to the project by posting a patch to upstream (!) instead of just patching it downstream. In addition my disservice to the project is trying to polish a stable code branch (nowhere this patch was mentioned to be intended for the KDE 4.1 development tree). I'll spend the rest of the day thinking about if we want to alienate our userbase even more by making them swallow down an unfinished product with rough edges and give them the feeling that whatever code branch, name it stable and released or unreleased and in development, they get the same amount of bleeding. Be free, and bleed freely.

There was Night, and there was Day, 4th Day. So, it turns out, I wasn't the first person to notice that the toolbox has only two features:

• It allows you to add a plasmoid to the background.
• It has a "break your desktop" button.

While it is arguably true, that the "Add plasmoid" (it is actually called "Add widgets" btw) has some value (the same value the context menu on the background, the panel, the kickoff menu and probably a couple of other places have as well). Note that I also don't want to mention how KDE 3 users have managed to find the hidden context menu in the past to add an applet to their panel, not because it is unimportant, just that I only have one week and I'm already at day 4.

So day four: I've asked my girlfriend what she thinks a widget is. And even though she lives with me for several years already, she couldn't describe it properly, nor explain me what she would expect to happen when she presses the button. Obviously its a translation thing, right? A "Widget" is the same as "I don't know the name of this thing" in German. Ah, so it adds a little "I don't know what its name is?" to "I don't know where" ? That makes perfect sense for this feature! I spent the rest of the day being depressed that I didn't take a picture of her face. I would have seen value in adding that picture to my desktop background.

So there was Night, and there was Day. 5th Day. You're expecting me to follow up on the "Break your desktop" ? Okay, well.. its the general reaction you get when you let new people that pop up on a fair where you demo the desktop try it. They go like "uhh.. it turns white.. I broke it!" and jump away from the computer, being frightened that they made a change that they cannot undo. but there is undo, right? Well, only 3 levels of undo, to be honest: if you zoom out more than 3 times, you cannot zoom back in, because you can't actually press the button anymore. The only way to undo that is to delete your plasma configuration or, for the average user, to reinstall your computer. Oh, another thing you learn from being a distro guy: whenever something happens that average users don't expect and they can't undo: they either call support (be it the 24 hour child/mother support hotline or some other) or if they have a little bit more knowledge, reinstall their computer. Or they ask somewhere on the net and get the recommendation to rm -rf ~/.kde. I spent the rest of the day enjoying the other blog about the "break your desktop" button and the followup, which was particularly funny. Unfortunately I cannot link that one anymore because the blog posting was pulled from the net. you can still find it in the Google cache if you try really hard. In essence it said that whenever one has a certain issue with Plasma, one should contact the developer mailing list instead of publically blogging about it. Which I did, btw. Or didn't I? Did I only blog because somebody else blogged about my blog which I'm writing now? Damn, I wish I'd had a day left to think about that.

So there was Night, and there was Day. 6th Day. I think after collecting the pieces, it is time to finish up. Or in my case, understand the big picture. Perhaps today "it also will grow into something that has clearer purpose". But wait, isn't that admitting that the previous days didn't have a clear purpose? The big picture for me is that somewhen we've apparently forgotten what it takes to be a good community: Be friendly, be constructive, allow different opinions to co-exist and clearly distinguish between technical issues and emotionally-overloaded sandbox-thinking. An additional bonus is to provide leadership by actually inspiring others and give them a clear vision, a vision that they can implement, that they can bugfix and polish and that they can understand well enough to share it with others.

So there was Night, and there was Day. 7th Day. And today, I need a bit of rest from all the blogging. Doesn't it piss you off as well that you can ping as much as you like, be open and constructive for a discussion as you like and still only end up being able to write up your own thoughts up in a post without actually being able to establish any constructive mind-sharing?

So, thats it. Or as downstream puts it: Have a lot of fun.

Dominik's post on visualizing reminded me of something I always wanted to blog about: kcachegrind is a nice interactive graph viewer that is easy to use for visualizing complex data. Similar to Dominik's script, I've written one that analyzes rpm dependencies (and the file components as part of it), and then you can load the cachegrind file (which is a very simple text based format similar to the .dot format of graphviz), and have the full power of an interactive GUI, namely:

• being able to search for a particular app
• being able to cut dependencies that just add complexity (e.g. the "ignore below 5%" threshold setting)
• quickly figure out how many packages depend on one particular package or similar questions

example screenshot of what I did about 10 months ago (installed size in bytes, before the openSUSE 10.3 cleanups):

short stories:

• kdetalk.net back online, after Martin Konold was able to resurrect the hard drive
• KDE 4.1 snapshot 4.0.63 released, openSUSE 10.3 packages are available
• Fosdem 2008 is coming up, hope to meet you there!

So it is Thursday again, the time for the weekly KDE 4.1 snapshot. openSUSE packages are already trickling down the line on the KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE:Desktop channel in the buildservice, and except for kdevelop things seem to build and run just fine.

Given that the Qt 4.4.0 beta1 was delayed again, Thiago and I decided that it would be a good chance to update to a snapshot and use the remaining time for pre-beta testing Qt 4.4. This has already paid off: quite a few issues were already fixed and many are still to be fixed. The most pressing problem at the moment is the incompatibility with kwin of KDE 4. As a workaround for now, the following can be added to your ~/.xsession:

export QT_USE_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

I'm sure we'll find a solution for that soon.

It has been a long day yesterday, but we finished building, bugfixing and testing openSUSE KDE 4.0.0 packages, including a bugfixed version of KDE 4.0.0 as Live CD and one Click Install. We've even tested and added workarounds for running KDE 4.0.0 on openSUSE 10.2. Factory updates were submitted this morning

I hope that our users realize that KDE 4.0.0 is not the end of KDE4 - it is the beginning of KDE 4. I'm really happy about the release because it is a big milestone and I anticipate that the KDE contributors will be glad that we reached this goal. It is a tremendously big motivation factor for all of us: To know that it is there. It might not be as shiny and feature-rich and configurable as the KDE 3.5.x series was, but it is real, you can see and use it, and you can find new ways to improve it. We've started to schedule 4.0.x bugfix releases on a monthly basis starting end of this month, and we will continue to regularly ship new fixes while we head for our new milestone: KDE 4.1, which is targetted to be a much more complete and configurable, KDE-ified experience. KDE is a truly free and open source project, so I especially like the new

Be free slogan. It is free, and it is yours.

From the KDE.org side, we've upgraded bandwidth and server power to anticipate the release announcement storm. So far everything still runs. Of course I'm watching the download numbers and so far I'm quite happy that the live CD is frequently fetched. But we can be better than the RC1 download numbers can't we?

This Friday and Saturday, the openSUSE KDE team will be hosting an openSUSE Packaging Day. It will happen from Friday, 30 November until Saturday, 1st December, from any timezone to any timezone. We will help new packagers to create high-quality packages for KDE for all kinds of distributions, like openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu or Debian via the openSUSE Build Service, so that other KDE users can benefit from it. Even better, all the sweat and tears might be rewarded by some openSUSE merchandising stuff!

If you`re interested in learning how to create binary packages, learn about all the openSUSE specific features that make your life easier or just want to help others in learning how to build software from source, please pop up in #opensuse-kde or #opensuse-buildservice. See ya!

I'm scared as well, but not because of the state of things - I think it is improving rapidly. And after all - it is named RC1, not final. I'm just scared because we`re overwhelmed by the download traffic (between 1-2 Gigabit per second) and we definitely need more bandwidth for the next release!