apaku

After about 3 weeks of “real work”, I really see that this cuts down open source development (unless you’re lucky and get paid for it during the day-job).

Its not like I haven’t done anything these past weeks, in fact especially the first 1-2 weeks were rather productive, because I had no internet at home. However its still far beyond what I was “used” to. When you get home, got your dinner and watched TV for an hour there’s this sleepiness slowly crawling into your body.

I partly blame the fact that we don’t have a nice sofa or armchair here in this little 1-room appartment. At least I really fall asleep easily when I’m well fed and lie on a bed, trying to keep my head up to see some boring TV show.

Ok, enough of me whining about this, time for getting the kdegames card cache done.

I’m really tired of hearing all the same things again. Can’t we just have a page on the front of kde.org which points everybody who’s interested to the reasoning of doing a .0 release with quite a lot less features than the current stable 3.5.8 release? And then just post the link to that on each and every newspage, blog or other place where people complain about lack of features, instability and what not in KDE 4.0?

I mean, anybody who really wants to understand the why, can already find out, there’s no point in posting yet another blog entry about the reasons. All others don’t care anyway, there’s no point in trying to educate them, they don’t want to be educated. Obviously these people are just interested in argueing, without any reasoning, they’re just looking for a fight.

So fellow developers: Lets just stick to the decision that has been made and move on (I know most of you already do). History will tell, wether this is a new era for KDE or the beginning of its doom. Either way its really been enough blogging/commenting/mailing about why we do a release now and what the downsides are.

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.

The last few days I spent again some time on porting kdevelop4 to win32. The first try was with mingw compiler, but the debugging techniques with that compiler are really poor. I don’t like the gdb console interface, especially that I can’t easily see breakpoints directly in the source code. I’ve tried a few visual debuggers but none really worked well.

So I decided to do the registration crap with M$ to re-activate my MSVC 2005 Express Edition. Along the way I found a strange bug in building qdbus here and also a shortcoming in the windbus cmake files (which got fixed meanwhile by Ralf Habacker). This time I used the emerge building-script for the first time and I’m quite impressed. It comes really close to what kdesvn-build provides for linux.

The larger task however was fixing all those little things where MSVC errors out because its often a lot pickier about correct code, like having no return statement in a non-void function. Unfortunately I’m stuck on the C++ part with a really strange linking problem (which doesn’t occur on mingw of course). If you’re interested have a look at the thread on the kde-windows mailinglist.

I also tried to replace the CommonC++ dependecy in the Teamwork plugin, but unfortunately I failed because of my lack of understanding how implicit-sharing and especially the WeakReference-stuff in the network library works. So still no win32 port for that plugin If anybody wants to have a try, there’s a “starting patch” that replaces the server-classes from CommonC++ with the eqiuvalent from Qt.

Alltogether it wasn’t that much effort (most of the problems where with the duchain and c++ support), though the gdb-part is not ported yet. I’m waiting for Vladimir to finish the threaded-debugger effort before starting that port.

So, today I said farewell to all the co-workers at the “Zentrum fuer Graphische Datenverarbeitung e.V.” in Rostock (thats a non-profit research facility). I’ve been working there as student since April 2005, so its been really quite a long time now. The last months was contract work because I’ve finished university. Its always been fun to work with them, though the work itself wasn’t always that much fun

Now I’m sitting here at my parents house and only have a bit more than one week before I’ll be one of those boring tax-payers. I’m going to move to my girlfriends place for the first days and see how driving from Lübeck to Hamburg will be. Whats great about the new job? I might have the opportunity to work with Qt/C++. I’ll be starting on January 2nd at Froglogic GmbH (some of you might know the founders) and as far as I can tell from the interview those guys are really nice and it seems to be a really cool working environment.

I’m looking forward to this new part of my life, though it’ll probably be a rough cut wrt. my spare time for KDE/KDevelop (also seeing that I’m not going to have internet for at least another week or two at my new home).

Diego is wrong, I doubt Konqueror will use QtWebkit with KDE 4.1, as far as I can see there’s still quite some way to go until there is a KPart for QtWebkit that has the same featureset as KHTML. Apart from that KHTML is still very active and very maintained, anybody looking at the commit log can see that. And so far I’ve only come across one site for which I need firefox, this blog page.

Diego is also wrong about another thing he said recently in his QDevelop announcement, unfortunately my comment there hasn’t been approved yet. Maybe there was something wrong about my name and email, unfortunately the blogsite doesn’t show anything in readable english and thus I had to guess where to write what. Anyway, what I wanted to comment on is that KDevelop can’t do the “maximize editor area to full mainwindow” thing, it can, all you have to do is close all toolwindows and you can do that in KDevelop3 with a simple keyboard shortcut. In KDevelop4 however you can even maximize the toolviews, this has been added by Hamish a few weeks ago, its really super-handy and very nice.

And last but not least I guess I also have to say something about the move of Trolltech. Its great, seeing that the xine-backend triggers a few problems/bugs in xine or even the kernel its really good to have another backend under linux (I have to admit that I’m not sure gstreamer works directly on top of alsa, maybe its using xine as well and thus the same problems might arise there). Its even better that we’ll have Windows and MacOS backends for KDE 4.0, that makes the whole process of porting to these platforms a lot faster - at least for the multimedia apps. And those might give KDE4 quite a momentum, at least on Windows where there are mainly two competitors which both are not as great as amarok.

Looking through the comments to the KDE4.0 RC2 makes me realize something once again: People don’t read and they don’t care.

Again comments of the type “KDE4 doesn’t deliver all stuff from KDE 3.5″ and all of them are lying. Nobody knows what KDE4 will deliver when its matured. None of you people has only the slightest idea what KDE 4.5 will look like.

Please people, start to read: We’re approaching the release of KDE 4.0.0, the important part there is the 0. KDE 4.0.0 is still a baby, it just started to learn how to walk and can barely talk. Give it time to actually grow up.

Hmm, I’m wondering if any of those who need a KDE4 KMail will actually read this…

Due to the recent amount of bugreports that are filed against KDevelop4, I’m inclined to write this.

When you find a build error in KDevPlatform or KDevelop and you can’t fix it yourself, write to the kdevelop-devel mailinglist. Subscription is here: http://www.kdevelop.org/index.html?filename=mailinglist.html
If you find crashes, other bugs or have feature wishes: Write to the -devel adress as well. KDevelop4 is not open for general testing, its currently in a kind of alpha state. So anybody trying to compile or run it should be able to either fix problems he encounters himself or talk to the developers on the mailinglist or on IRC (in #kdevelop).

Until further notice all bugreports against KDevelop4 will be closed as Invalid.