You want to help us make progresses on KDE Frameworks 5... But you're not sure
you're up to the job? You don't know what to look at or where to start? You're
not sure what it takes to be a KDE Framework maintainer?
Fear not! We're thinking about you, and we will have the first KDE Frameworks 5
volunteer day next saturday.
Come and join us! Saturday February 18 on Freenode #kde-devel channel!
This day will be driven by Aaron Seigo (aseigo) and myself (ervin) from 10am
to 6pm CET. Feel free to ping us on the channel.
We will be around to guide you answer all the questions you didn't dare asking
to get yourself started on helping us with KDE Frameworks 5.
We're preparing tasks to allocate to volunteers, and they will range from the
small self-contained code adjustment, to splitting your own KDE Framework out
of kdelibs and becoming its maintainer. Eternal glory will be provided with
any task package you pick, so don't hesitate anymore, it's your chance right
now!
Remember Saturday, 10am to 6pm CET, #kde-devel on Freenode, be there,
help our community!
Didn't blog in a while... Indeed the end of 2011 was hectic lots happening
(both at work and in the community) so almost no time to write about it.
Despite Christmas and the New Year I didn't take vacations in December,
I admit I'm now a bit tired.
Anyway, the last few months were awesome, as I said: lots happening. So let's
take a look in this post at the latest endeavours I participated in be it
technical or community work.
# Akademy-fr / Capitole du Libre
The path leading to end of November has seen [Benjamin Port][ben] putting quite
some work in the organization of the very first [Akademy-fr][ak-fr]. It's been
a very important event for the french KDE community.
This event was grouped inside the [Capitole du Libre][cdl] with an Ubuntu Party,
a DrupalCamp and two tracks of conferences on Free Culture. As usual, the whole
[Toulibre][t] LUG was a great support to organize such activities.
The first day, we managed to fit two tracks of talks in [Akademy-fr][ak-fr] itself,
one oriented toward contributors, the other meant for users. It was a nice success
overall even though we maybe suffered a bit from the user track of the
[Capitole du Libre][cdl] for our own track. That's understandable and something
to fix for later. We also had a booth where we demoed the different productions of
KDE. Using one of the Exo-PC with [Plasma Active][pa] on it was just great to
attract people, it is also great to show such a device next to a Plasma Desktop
powered computer as it helps illustrating how coherent thoses workspaces are
together (activites being pervasive concepts, same widgets to operate the devices,
etc.).
The second (and last) day of [Akademy-fr][ak-fr] and [Capitole du Libre][cdl] was
dedicated to workshops and labs. I think it was a really nice idea and we should
keep it for the next edition. There was a bit less attendance, such workshops are
more involving and requires to engage more with the community so it's
understandable they can be a bit more frightening. Still, it was just great to
get people trained on how to make a proper bug report, how to make their own
Calligra plugins and such.
Of course, the real plus of this event is that most of the french KDE contributors
showed up, we also got "pure-Qt" french contributors around. Funnily, all of
[KDAB][kdab] France showed up in the end. Anyway, it was really nice to gang with
already known faces again, but also to finally meet some people we only heard of so far.
Thanks to the [sponsors][cdl] who made this event possible. Also, thanks to everyone
who helped, held a talk, or simply attended: you made the event a success! Finally, I'd
like to give a special thanks to Aleix Pol who traveled from Spain to talk about
Akademy-es and KDE España (which are both nice inspiration for us).
*PS: I finally uploaded the handful of [pictures I took during Akademy-fr 2011][ak-fr-p]*
# Zanshin 0.2.0
Lot's happened around [Zanshin][z] which led to its first proper release. Most notably
it got its own website now, and we fixed bugs like crazies leading to the release of 0.2.0
the day before [Akademy-fr][ak-fr] (although the public announcement was done only the
week after).
It's also interesting to see it picked up by packagers, and now it is available on most
of the major Linux distributions and on Windows. Hopefully it will sooner or later reach
Mac OS as well, it has been reported to build and run by a couple of users but there's no
official packaging for it yet.
The community around Zanshin also grew a bit, with a couple of contributors gettings in.
I'm looking forward to see their influence inside the project. Nice ideas floating around
at the moment. We'll have to implement those ideas incrementally of course otherwise the
next release will be one of those long cycles again but I'd love to see shorter cycles for
Zanshin now.
# KDE Frameworks
After a period of some slow down, the KDE Frameworks is picking up again. I volunteered
to help with the stewardship of that effort which led to some discussions and the creation
of a [wiki to track KDE Frameworks state][kf5].
It's obviously still on-going so the wiki needs to be improved, but it helped quite a bit
already in decision making and figuring out where we are headed and where we want to be.
On the people side, we're getting contributions in but more importantly as we make kdelibs
more modular we're finding volunteers to maintain the newly created library. It think that
beyond the technical side of [KDE Frameworks][kf5] this trend is a very important one to
nurture.
Indeed, the number of maintainers in kdelibs has been only a few for a very long time, and
even though we have people interested in it they don't necessarily commit to be maintainers.
With the modularization it is apparently less scary to step up to take care of one of the
modules created, they're well identified, have a given scope and so on. Less unknowns then
leads to less fear.
I find interesting how the motivation for [KDE Frameworks][kf5] was mainly technical, but
is apparently changing the structure of the community. My take is that it will lead to a
somewhat similar organization to the [Qt Project][qt]. Only time will tell anyway, but
it's fascinating to be a direct witness of the on-going evolution.
# KDE Toulouse & Monthly Hacking Sessions
The [KDE Monthly Hacking Sessions][tak] are just running as usual, we keep having this monthly
get together on saturdays people carrying on their work, but also having a talk or a workshop
in the morning. Thanks to [Benjamin Port and Jean-Nicolas Artaud][ben] strong involvement, this
activity is more secure than ever not being completely dependent on me being available and
relaxing constraints on my own schedule. Thanks for that guys! It helps the whole group having
enough energy to undertake other activities (like the Akademy-fr above). Say no to burn-out,
distribute work! :-)
We had less people attending the sessions at the end of 2011, probably in part because of
[Akademy-fr][ak-fr] being around the corner by then. There was also some other factors but
we have plan to fix that. January's session, held yesterday was the proof of the continuing
interest in those monthly events, we had another of those high attendance rate of the good old
days. It was even further improved thanks to [Akademy-fr][ak-fr]. Indeed, we met Romain Perier
who attended the conference in November and we were delighted to have him motivated enough
to volunteer for holding the workshop part yesterday, travelling just for the day to do it!
Thanks a lot Romain! It was really nice to have you around, hope to see you soon again.
# Toulouse University Involvement
Bad news there... this activity came to a halt. We saw it coming for a while, but last year
was the last time our projects and teaching to run with the IUP ISI (the course of study
whose director, Henri Massié, trusted us to do a good job there). Indeed, after a few years
of political games (mostly driven from the ministry as far as I can tell), all the "IUP"
type of courses of studies disappeared. The IUP ISI was one of the last to carry the
torch...
I thought I'd just carry on with another course of study this year. But I have to admit this
abrupt ending and the way it happened (nasty details I'll spare you) just hit my motivation
more than I expected. So somehow I still have to recover from it, but I have some leads
and potential contacts to maybe setup something again for 2012-2013. Let's see if I manage
to revive that activity. Apparently, after seven years of efforts to nurture that
collaboration, I'm back to square one. Challenge accepted!
On the brighter side though, I got invited to a whole day seminar in Paris early February
to discuss and share with people on the topic of University/Free Software Communities
collaboration for student projects and teaching. Nice opportunity to meet with people
having similar aims and share on alternative setups to the one we had in Toulouse.
Really looking forward to this event.
# What's coming next?
Well, I don't plan much ahead and I'm not the type of guy taking "good
resolutions" in january every year (I just try to improve as I go). Still...
from the waves around me, my own motivation at the moment and some other factors
I think I can forecast a bit of what's coming.
Obviously I expect new [Zanshin][z] releases, at least two. Zanshin 0.2.1 should
appear soonish as mentionned earlier. And then we'll roll toward Zanshin 0.3
which will be the release where Zanshin gets more of the missing basic features
making it really useful.
I also expect the first [KDE Frameworks][kf5] release. Quite some work needed still, but
I have a target date in mind that I think we can reach... No, I won't share it
yet. :-)
Maybe I'll also get through the necessary mourning and administrative steps to setup
a new University/KDE collaboration in Toulouse.
And last but not least I expect our monthly sessions to go on as usual. It's just
great to have a small team of people helping with the local promotion, I'd like
to see it grow more to spread even more love. Despite the current team size it's very
likely we'll pull another [Akademy-fr][ak-fr], but this time truely focused on the
contributors needs, while the end-user aspects would be completely provided by talks
and workshops of the upcoming [Capitole du Libre][cdl] 2012.
And so that concludes my last look back at 2011. Time to look forward again, lots
to tackle still. :-)
[ak-fr]: http://toulibre.org/akademyfr "Akademy-fr 2011"
[ak-fr-p]: http://ervin.smugmug.com/Events/Akademy-fr-2011 "Akademy-fr 2011 pictures"
[ben]: http://blog.ben2367.fr/ "Benjamin Port's and Jean-Nicolas Artaud's blogs"
[cdl]: http://capitoledulibre.org "Capitole du Libre"
[kdab]: http://www.kdab.com "KDAB"
[kf5]: http://community.kde.org/Frameworks "KDE Frameworks development tracking wiki"
[pa]: http://www.plasma-active.org "Plasma Active"
[qt]: http://www.qt-project.org "Qt Project"
[t]: http://toulibre.org "Toulibre"
[tak]: http://toulibre.org/ateliers_kde "Ateliers KDE"
[z]: http://zanshin.kde.org "Zanshin"
Damn! I didn't even finish my blogging about the Oslo sprint... so
much stuff to do. Well, I'll probably make another post about it,
more focused on the results we obtained regarding
[Solid](http://solid.kde.org) and what I learned there (in short: a
lot!).
The three weeks which followed were quite exhausting. First just
after the Oslo sprint, we still had quite some work to finish the
required refactoring in time for the freeze on the 1st May. But we
managed to merge the branch, do the work and have it working for
the Alpha1. So you'll get nice Solid and Phonon with kdelibs 4.0
Alpha1. There's probably a couple of cleanups to do until the 4.0
release, but nothing huge. In my opinion, the APIs matured quite a
bit thanks to the trolls expertise. Once again it proves that when
you work next to other people next door you can achieve far more in
less time. We should really keep in mind that more sprints are good
for the project!
After that I spent most of my time on my PhD... My life was the one
of a monomaniac: sleep, eat, write, sleep eat write, etc. But now I
have issued the first draft of my PhD thesis! Was hard but worth
it, there's only half a chapter missing because I'm waiting for
someone else data. That's just nice to finally see something that
looks like a thesis, not a bunch of notes and files scattered on my
disks. It's now in the lab for internal review. When it'll be done
I'll write the missing bit (hopefully it should be straightforward)
and be able to enter the official review process... and maybe get
my diploma. That's still a few months away though, since because of
the length of the review process and the summer coming the
(potential) diploma won't be delivered before september or october.
Administration takes holidays very seriously here. :-)
And now? Well, I'm going to travel again! Actually I noticed that
I'm only spending two or three weeks at home between my trips this
year... It's going to last like this until
[aKademy](http://akademy.kde.org). But, the coming trip has
something special, I'll be on the other side of the globe this
time, the first time I go that far. I got a paper accepted to
[AAMAS 2007](http://www.aamas2007.org) and since I'll attend
tomorrow morning I'll travel to
[Honolulu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honolulu) by plane.
Since I'm staying longer
[for](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Oahu_from_air2.jpg)
[obvious](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Oahu_windward_side_beach.jpg)
[reasons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Valley_Oahu.png), I'll
be back home in two weeks. I don't know since I'll probably have
trouble having internet access (depends a lot on the conference
organisation): see you in two weeks!
Yesterday night and today, I got back on porting and bugfixing
mode. We've still some work to do to have everything ported to
D-Bus so everybody is participating to this on going effort. I
finally spotted a bug in kpersonalizer that made your session turn
black... so now you can actually see the content of your windows.
;-)
Today, we started to see a few boxes having KDE 4 sessions running
decently: kicker, kdesktop, konsole, kwrite... are running.
Konqueror can be started by hand, but it still requires some work
to make it launchable from the menu and kicker again. Of course
it's still rough on the edges, but that's really nice to see all
this running again after so many changes and refactoring. We've
still so much to do, but the improvements made in the last few days
are really motivating.
Just like yesterday, we had a truely nice lunch. It was prepared
with love by Will, great coder, awesome cook. Thanks a lot Will!
This evening, we're all hacking as usual. But it seems that today
we have quite a concentration of "hackers on a couch".
After all it's a really nice place to hack, why not using it. ;-)
Today, I finally committed the last part of my job refactoring in
KDE. We'll finally have jobs usable accross KDE application without
being tied to KIO. Moreover thanks to the UI delegate I introduced,
the dependency on GUI is now optional. It can even be used to have
several representations possible for a set of job. A UI Delegate
for the command line, one for classical dialogs, one to publish job
progresses in a Plasma message area.
Today meals were truely nice. For lunch, Will took the initiative
to make pastas for everybody. Thanks a lot Will! For dinner the
catering service provided us tons of food again. Almost no meat
which is a nice thing for the vegetarians here... we don't want
them to starve. ;-)
This evening a big part of the
[Trysil](http://dot.kde.org/1151271635/) team is watching the World
Cup:
As you might have noticed, there's one person really concentrated
in front of the TV. Ok, let's zoom in, see how Laurent is highly
motivated by the french team:
Ok, skipped one day... time to blog again. ;-)
Yesterday, everybody worked hard. I spent quite some time working
on splitting useful GUI related code outside of KIO. This way it'll
be reusable for other frameworks like Akonadi or Solid. It's a big
chunk of work, so it was far from finished but I decide to go to
bed early.
Hence why today morning I managed to wake up earlier... And caught
up Harald when he was trying to wake up:
Cute, isn't it? =)
During the whole day, I continued my work with jobs and kio, the
first phase of the changes is almost ready to commit. I've been
stopped mostly by only two events: a group meeting (will probably
end up as a proposal on k-c-d), and lunch. Hmmmm, Lunch! We had a
BBQ, it was just perfect! Thanks to Marius for managing this so
well.
George and Celeste arrived this afternoon, it's nice to see them
around again. We're almost all there, only Till is missing, but
he's supposed to arrive later tonight.
This evening the german team is playing in the world cup. That's
why we're facing a strange phenomenon, it started with coolo, but
people here are infected by a german fever:
Gooood evening Planet KDEEEE!
Woke up a bit late today, well that's understandable since I got to
sleep at almost 4am. On the other hand, when I left kdelibs was
able to compile so it was worth it. ;-)
Today I basically worked on the kdelibs and kdebase stabilization.
Now that we're moving them to Qt 4.2 we have a few things to fix.
We're slowling getting there, hopefully tomorrow the situation will
be ok there.
During the afternoon, we made a break to have a walk around the
area. It's really a beautiful place, we stopped at a swampy field
where we made a group photo:
Actually, what you're seeing above is the second try... For the
first take I had Aaron in all his glory:
See you later, I'm going back to kdebase porting.
Hello from [Trysil](http://dot.kde.org/1151271635/), Norway!
I finally arrived in Norway. No real event disturbed the trip,
which is always good even if a bit boring. I met for the first time
Alexander Neundorf and Tobias Koenig in Oslo airport. Nice to meet
you guys.
We found our way to the bus. While we were waiting for it Allan
Sandfeld arrived too... he was supposed to take the next bus, but
since it would have required him to wait for two hours he took the
same than us. Our bus was really full of people and we had the nice
surprise to find Zack Rusin and Marius Monsen in it.
After a three hours trip by bus, we reached the cabin... It's...
well... GREAT(tm). A picture says it all, here is the view we have
outside:
And inside it's cosy. Since we have a TV, a few hackers here
watched a soccer world cup match:
I'm really glad to be here, the next coming week will surely be
terrific. All the conditions are met to make us very productive!
