apaku

I’m Mentor again this year in Google’s Summer of Code. I’m again mentoring a KDevelop4 project, the title is: xUnit test harness for KDevelop4.

Manuel Breugelmans was chosen do to the project, he’s a student at the university of Antwerp in Belgium. He’s a new developer in the Qt/KDE/KDevelop world, but has already quite good C++ skills. Apparently he also has quite some knowledge about unit testing as he’s writing a tool to analyze xUnit code and visualize it.

The project itself aims to provide some infrastructure to ease the creation and execution of tests within KDevelop4, the most important deliverables are stub test template creation, report and coverage framework and a graphical test runner. The current plan includes supporting QtTest, CppUnit, Check and PyUnit.

I’m confident this will be a success as Manuel has already dived into possible solutions for some things, including contacting authors of existing test-runner tools to talk about collaboration.

I just got back home from the hackathon (well, I picked up keys for a new appartment also, so it wasn’t a 12 hour trip back). Its really sad that its now over, it was a really great time meeting all the people and putting faces to the nicknames. I would’ve liked to stay longer with all of the hackers.

We did quite some progres this week, trying to fix Ui problems (didn’t get around to all of them), making C++ support work more reliably, improving cmake support with language features, changing some API in some places to have more freedom and improving the debugger a lot. I was able to use KDevelop4 for hacking in the last 4 days which feels really great and finally forces us to really fix all those small annoyances.

I’m looking forward to more commits in the upcoming weeks, as I think everybody got quite a motivation boost.

And a big thanks to Harald for organizing the meeting and finding sponsors for it.

As I’m just re-compiling KDev4 I’ve got a few spare minutes to blog.

So we had a really great weekend with lots of interesting speaks and even more discussions about what we want/need to have in KDevelop4 and how things should work. The todo-list got ridiculously large (which is good actually)

And right now everybody except Hamish (who got a bit sick after last nights “Schweinshaxe”) is hacking to bring KDevelop4 into a usable state. The User interface got large fixes and the C++ support shouldn’t crash so often anymore. Actually I noticed that a release build of kdelibs+kdevelop is a bit more stable because assert’s are ignored.

Personally its really inspiring to sit here within a group of 10 other geeky hackers and get something cool done.

Oh and btw. I think we can now invite interested “testers” to try out kdevelop4, I’m using it since 2.5 days now and it is pretty usable already, albeit a tad bit slow and crashy in debug-build. So I’ll either start hacking on workspace support now or also do my tad bit of boring Ui stuff - not sure.

Yes, its that time of the year again. Time to get your creativity out and find some nice things to hack on for Google’s Summer of Code. Looking at the ideas page on Techbase you’ll find only one SoC idea for KDevelop, but we already discuss 3 other possible projects. These projects are ideas that originated from students, which has proven to be the most successful way of getting a SoC project finished. So for this year we’d like to see more of those student-proposed ideas and thus keep the list of developer-proposed ideas short.

So if you’ve got some C++ experience and would like to work on a really great IDE, check out KDevelop3 or KDevelop4 and see if you can find something thats missing, something that can be improved (granted you’ll find a lot of that in KDevelop4). Or browse bugs.kde.org for our list of wishlist items. Last thing you could do is see if you find another IDE that does something awesome and try to implement that in KDevelop4.

If you have a nice idea for KDevelop4 then come to #kdevelop on irc.freenode.org or to our developer mailinglist (kdevelop-devel@kdevelop.org, subscription at kdevelop.org) and explain your idea. We’re happy to help with the details for the proposal and to give general feedback on how well suited the idea is for SoC.

What I really love about myself is that for some reason I can’t stop making really stupid mistakes. I know everybody makes them, but somehow I’ve got the feeling I’m doing much more than anybody else.

Latest two occurence are bugs in KDevelop3.5.0 (one of them being in probably all releases since 3.4.0). I mean how damn stupid does somebody have to be to

a) use 2 variables, one named line the other named sline in the same function and

b) then mix those two variables up, which results in this: Bugreport 158236

The other one was pointed out on IRC today, stupid logic mixup with the same code in the else-part as in the if-part of an if-else. No wonder that you can’t turn off the warnings in QMake projects in KDevelop3.

I only catched the last one “by accident”, because I usually read the IRC backlog when I wasn’t sitting at the PC for a while. This one probably wouldn’t have ended in bugzilla as apparently some people think its not worthwhile to file bugreports against KDevelop3.

Thats however not true, especially if you’re not using one of the unmaintained parts. But even then, no bugreport is always worse than a bugreport that gets closed as wontfix (or fixed in 4.0 which is not yet usable on a wide scale). Obviously the problem here is to know which parts are unmaintained. So here’s a (probably incomplete) list:

fortran, java, php, python (this one will come back for 4.1), sql, csharp, bash, pascal, kdevdesigner (short note: use the normal Qt designer, you loose almost nothing and gain a lot of stability), valgrind, fileselector (known to be pretty buggy), distribution packaging, texttools, clearcase, perforce.

I’m not saying that bugs (especially crashes and the like) against these components will simply rot, I’m just saying its unlikely that they’ll get much attention as we simply don’t have many active developers and need to work on KDevelop4.

As a recent thread on kde-devel showed that nearly nobody knows about this, I thought I’d blog again about Sublime. Alexander already wrote two parts, here and here
and it was even featured in a commit-digest article. Obviously thats still not enough

So to put it short: If you want an IDEAl like user interface, that is dockwidgets (note: not necessarily QDockWidget) and a central editor area, then I invite you to have a look at Sublime Sublime. Its a Ui library thats solely based on Qt and kdelibs, even though its currently part of the KDevelop Development Platform. Its not yet finished, but it already supports quite some stuff that KDevelop3 had, including buttons for toolviews, automatic hiding of them, maximizing a toolview and “always show” option. The API is also prepared to support different Area’s (Eclipse calls this perspectives), so you can have different views into your application (for IDE’s this can be used to have a Debug, Code, Test and Design Area).

Once there’s another two apps using Sublime (and the Area stuff is implemented) we can even think about moving it to kdelibs, making it easier for apps that don’t need kdevplatform to use it.

Oh, I guess a small screenie is good (click for larger picture):

So finally the dot story is out, there’s going to be a KDevelop Hackathon in April in Munich. There’s even a “free-for-all” (as space allows) weekend to get to know us, or finally try to talk us into implementing your greatest feature wish for KDevelop

KDevelop “oldtimer” Harald Fernengel pulled this one off and so far Andras (quanta developer) and myself have their tickets booked. Alexander and Vladimir are also almost set, just need their Visa and hopefully Aleix exam plans allow him to come as well.

I’m rather excited, this will be the first time I’m meeting other KDE hackers - besides the handful of people at froglogic. Especially interesting to see how much fun we can have hacking on KDevelop4 full time

So if I’ve got you interested read the article on the dot for further information.

Two days ago we received an email and a letter telling us that alice would connect dsl on thursday. And they indeed managed to do so. So finally I’m online again the whole time

It was just a couple of days (alltogether 7) but still, it sucks to only be able to send/receive mails and svn updates once a day.

Lets see who’s on IRC right now

Just a “quickie” while I wait for kdevelop3 to open the kdev4 sources.

I just did some debugging with MS Visual C++ and I feel like hugging our own debugger guru Vladimir Prus. I often heard people on #kdevelop complaining about the KDevelop3 debugger being sooo slow when debugging, especially compared to MSVC. Sorry, but I can’t sign that anymore, doing a procedure step in MSVC takes at least 1 or 2 seconds and it is not much slower than in KDevelop3 (kdev3 is a bit slower than that, but nothing that you have to whine about it :). Also I noticed that MSVC forgot about a few local variables in its variable list, something that never happened in Kdevelop3 for me.

We do lack a couple of features from MSVC and I agree that KDev3’s debugger still does some things far too often, but really its not that bad at all.

I was almost there, I was soooo close to fixing the last few bugs in KDevelop4’s cmake support to work properly on win32.

And then I did a horrible mistake: Let Windows XP install the security updates. I don’t know how, but that completely screwed Windows network stack, to a point where nothing network-related even started. I started to undo some of the updates and at some point I got the network connections folder populated again. But I couldn’t get it back to actually assign IP’s as configured to the network adaptor.

So now I’m sitting here re-installing windows, just to test wether the last bugfix really helped…

Edit:

I’m up and running again (after only 3 hours) and that bugfix I was talking about wasn’t the last one. There are at least two more asserts waiting to be fixed.