sizing up the field

So Nokia has announced a partnership with Microsoft around the Windows mobile stack, as I'm sure you are all aware of now. There have been various blogs and reactions to this around, including on planetkde.org. Reading them, it's evident that there's a fair amount of emotion and not a lot of fact on the ground.

While I have little good to say of the announcement that was made, what remains of interest to me is the level of investment in Qt, the strategic positioning of MeeGo going forward and what KDE's role can and will be as both of those things continue to mature.

Open governance around Qt is moving forward briskly and from what I gather there are some interesting and useful announcements to come. R&D investment continues. However, we (KDE) won't know the full shape of how this will impact our landscape in the mid- and long-terms until we speak more with people at Nokia as well as within the Qt team itself. That's going to take weeks, not hours or days. Pretty much anything said before then is going to be premature and stand an awfully high chance of being wrong. Qt is a big ecosystem with many players right now, and as with any big company making a big announcement sorting out the practical implications is not something done in an hour or a day.

What we in KDE need are calm, stable heads to plot the lay of the land first and then examine how our strategy should be adapted and extended. Change often produces opportunity, but first one has to understand the change to recognize the opportunities. Right now it's infeasible to speak to what the real opportunities and challenges are without first doing our homework.

Discussions with people in "in the know" positions about the relevant issues are happening and, most encouragingly, it seems likely at this point that KDE will be putting a task force together to focus on this evolving situation to ensure our interests are considered and that we can arrive at an informed and intelligent response.

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git 'er done

I can't believe nobody has blogged this yet, but kdelibs and kdebase are now both in git! There's also been a bit of a reorganization undertaken. Led by our fearless git migration rule writers Ian and Nicolás, we have five repositories where once there were four:

• kdelibs (ok, no surprises yet..)


• kde-runtime, which used to be kdebase/runtime/


• kde-baseapps, which lumps together the file managers and related utilities (like bookmarks editors, kdialog, etc)


• konsole


• kde-workspace, which used to be kdebase/workspace and now contains all things Plasma Workspaces; yes, that includes stuff like the mighty KWin and KSysGuard. Of course libplasma is still in kdelibs.

Also of note is that the KTextEditor interface, while still in kdelibs, is primarily developed in (and sync'd with) the code in the Kate git repository.

This is setting the stage for a nice opportunity for us to work on the further modularization of the KDE Platform for app devel while also giving the workspaces a clearer and more separate footing on their own.

Judging by the commit rate, it's also making us more efficient already. :) Some "getting used to this new set of tools" accidents are happening, but we've got some great and caring shepherds helping the herd on its way.

The sys admins have, as usual, been phenomenal. Many of us are using this trick to not only make our git clone commands shorter, but to also set up a very clever system in which pulls transparently happen from anongit and only pushes go the slow boat route through ssh. To put the proverbial cherry on top, sysadmin wrangled it so that when something is pushed to git.kde.org is immediately start propagating to the anongit servers. This push approach means no delay for (and thus no collaboration downside to using) the anongit servers. Pure magic.

I hear rumblings of both KDE Edu and KDE Games about to take the plunge as well. Expect lots more repositories which, I fear, will make building by hand a bit more time consuming. The savior is likely to be kdesrc-build or something very much like it. With the XML being generated by projects.kde.org, doing meta-builds (e.g. "give me all the edu titles") should still be single commands and, even better, fully automated as things change in the repositories. (Including interdependencies!) I'm optimistic that this will replace our somewhat hard to get through "how to get started building KDE" documentation we have right now on Techbase with something that takes 10 minutes to install, learn and set running to get a complete build. We're not there yet, but we're on our way!

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... if you thought 4.6.0 was good

I'm really happy with how the number of bug reports coming in is not a massive deluge of different bugs, but mostly just endless repetition of the same handful. For some of them (like the notifications collapse triggered crash on exit) we're getting several duplicates per day, so we know it's not just because people aren't using or reporting!

Even better than having bugs reported is having bugs fixed, of course. Which is exactly what's been happening in droves. From multi-screen fixes to panel hiding fixes to, yes, fixing that on-exit crash, we're smacking the bugs down as fast as we can so that next month's 4.6.1 release will be beautifully solid.

I'm hoping that the upcoming springtime releases of the various distributions will be able to benefit from this bug fixing spree as well so that users installing the defaults will have a great experience too.

Not that 4.6 is the only thing we're on to these days, of course. I've put together an activities runner (and speaking of activities, here's another nice blog entry on them, this time from Hans Chen) so that in 4.7 you can type thing like "activity" in KRunner to get a list of activities or follow that up with the name of (or start of the name of!) an activity to switch to it. Marco's been working on some Plasma application dashboard love and more QML goodies. We have "Apply" buttons in the Plasmoid config dialogs (shock! shock!). We've also begun in earnest on our 2011 roadmap (well, it actually stretches into the beginning of 2012, but.. details :) and started planning for our next dev sprint, Tokamak V, in the spring.

One thing we already know is that we feel we're on the "right" track with activities now and will spend a significant investment of our resources in 4.7 to fleshing them out further.

Meanwhile, I'm counting down the days until the movers come to grab my stuff to put on a dock so it can go in a boat which can go to the UK which can then drop it on another dock before it somehow, somewhen makes its way to my doorstep in Zurich. I leave here on the last day of the month, and there just doesn't seem to be enough days left. A little nerve wracking ... but very exciting! I can't wait to be in the new place, meeting new people and, of course hacking on good ol' KDE from a new location. One where I don't have to be up at 1:00 am on a regular basis just to attend team meetings. :)

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