apaku

KDevelop4 updates

C++ support in KDev4 really rocks, if kdevelop doesn’t crash. Unfortunately it did so about 6 or 8 times in the last hour, luckily most of the time it was the second instance in which I tested my changes 🙂 The main instance was only crashing when I removed the .kdevduchain from under it, to get the second instance up and running. Apparently the repository management needs a bit more safety..

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that C++ support rocks. David already blogged about the various things he did, but today was the first time since a long while that I actually used KDev4 for more than 5 minutes (well, just about 2 hours, but still). It actually saved me a handful of compile-fix cycles in that time, which I find quite valuable, especially as I get easily frustrated when there are spelling mistakes or some stupidity created by me. Obviously it doesn’t catch all problems, but if I imagine I compile my code at work only twice instead of 5 times to get a fix into it, that would already save quite some time over the day.

On other news: I’ve implemented a (currently rather simple) selection controller on the weekend and now I’ve added some code that uses it. This makes all the build-related actions in the project menu enable/disable themselves properly. And more importantly it allows to simply build the selected item(s) from the project tree. Nobody needs to figure out anymore how to use that buildset thing (which will stay as its quite usable when building multiple things).

The next step I want to do is making the initial usage of CMake projects easier by adding configure() as a dependency to build(). And then configure() will check for a builddir and if none is configured it will ask for one. This would mean that after creating a new cmake project or opening an existing one you can simply hit “build” and kdevelop will ask you for a builddir and start building afterwards. Hopefully I get that done over the weekend.

Oh and before I forget it, I revamped (yes again) the Project->Open, now its again a “plain” file selection dialog. However it now allows to select a .kdev4 file or any file that can be handled by one of the project plugins as “project file” (i.e. cmake plugin support CMakeLists.txt, QMake support .pro files and Makefile plugin supports various types of Makefiles). Along with support for opening a directory directly with just the generic importer. So I managed to integrate import+open into one dialog without any drawbacks (at least I can’t see any).

No pics, its 12am and I need my beauty sleep right now, if you want to see it: fetch kdevplatform+kdevelop from svn (and kdelibs rc1 as you’ll need that). Unfortunately nothing of the above is in the last released alpha from those modules.

JIT bugfixing for Xrandr

Last thursday/friday I sat down in another attempt to fix the problems I had with enabling my second monitor under a KDE4 desktop. KWin crashed for me as soon as I interacted with a window on the second screen and plasma didn’t add a containment for the new screen. I ended up in kephal, the new multi-screen library we have for KDE 4.2, which apparently didn’t notice the change in the X11 monitor layout.

After a post to the kwin list with tons of debug output and (hopefully) useful information, Guillaume Pothier answered with a path! After a bit of back and forth he was able to fix all problems he could find. This instantly fixed all problems I had with kwin and plasma.

So with KDE 4.2 I’m finally able to work on my laptop while watching Tv and then take it to my desk, add the external monitor and enjoy the two screen system. A big thanks to the kepahl developer. So as Alexander, I can finally say to anybody: If you want a slick modern desktop just install KDE 4.2 🙂

PS : Also a big thank you to all other KDE devs which worked hard to make KDE 4.2 a really good Desktop Environment.

PPS: Oh, btw, AFAIK the mentioned fix hasn’t made it into the rc1, so don’t be worried if you’re running that and still have issues.