6th June 2003 by Derek Kite

This Week...

Improvements and bugfixes to the new tab code used in Konqueror and now Quanta. Numerous usability enhancements in Kmail, easier keyboard shortcut editing, flickering toolbars fixed. Kdeprint gets a new PPD parser. Kstars hardware interface is extended. And many bug fixes throughout.
This SCO nonsense has everyone nervous. It would ruin our day to have legions of lawyers swarming around. So, when David Faure committed an effects patch from mosfet, Dirk Mueller asked:
why was this committed ? It doesn't give proper copyright, hence is unlicensed code: http://www.imagemagick.org/www/Copyright.html
Daniel M. Duley aka mosfet responded:
The copyright for ImageMagick is more or less BSD. There are no license issues with the effects, we've had effects based on them since KDE3.0. Previous versions KDE had of the same effects were also based on ImageMagick.

Most of what Dirk quoted are licenses for various things ImageMagick uses or GraphicsMagick. If you say ImageMagick code is not under a valid license then your saying BSD code isn't under a valid license ;-) If you feel we should a add a credit in the code that is fine but I don't think it's necessary since it's not a "substantial" portion of ImageMagick.
Dirk Mueller requested:
"substantial" is of course open to discussion, but I don't think it would hurt when being included, would it?
The license was committed to cvs. Better safe than sorry.
Dominique Devriese announced a new release of Kig:
KDE Interactive Geometry 0.5.1, a bugfix release over Kig 0.5.0 is now available.

Kig is the most intuitive Interactive Geometry program available (including commercial ones), and has most of the features that the competition has to offer. Improvements over Kig 0.5.0 include:
  • a better full screen mode
  • printing support
  • code cleanup
  • various bugfixes
  • various UI improvements
Please check out http://edu.kde.org/kig/download.php for download instructions.

Thanks to the people who reported bugs, and requested improvements in Kig.
Kdeedu now compiles in cvs, so it is a good time to try the excellent educational apps such as Kig, Kstars Kalzium and many others.

If you want be bleeding edge, Gentoo users can check out http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/kde-cvs.html. Debian users go to KDE CVS HEAD Debian packages. Non distribution specific instructions http://developer.kde.org/build/compile_cvs.html. Konstruct will build a system in your home directory, instructions http://konsole.kde.org/konstruct/. Konstruct won't give you an up to date cvs snapshot however.

If you know of any other distribution specific instructions for running kde from cvs, drop me a line. dkite@shaw.ca
I received a note from Andras Mantia regarding the developments in Quanta
During the last weeks there were some improvements made in Quanta, that I think would be good if you could mention.

One of the new features is the completion of the new tag attribute editor widget. This allows you to edit the attributes for a tag in a tree-view, instead of a modal dialog. The treeview works similar to the Property Editor in QT Designer, so instead of offering simply to enter the attribute values as string, there is a possibility to select the values from a list, with the help of a dialog, and so, depending on the type of the attribute. Currently there are widgets for boolean, url, list and color attributes, the rest must be inserted as string.

If the attribute editor tree is not visible, you can use View->Tree Views->Show Attribute Tree or select a predefined layout in Settings->Configure Quanta->Layout->Window Layout. The latter is a new feature.

The other important feature is offpage parsing and variable scope detection for script like DTDs. This means that if you have a file included in a PHP section, the file will be parsed for function and variable definitions, and the found elements will be visible in the structure tree and will appear in the autocompletion box. Only the global variables are taken in count. The variable scope is detected also in the active document, and local variables will not be visible outside of the block where they are defined. There are some minor issues with the scope detection, and the current parsing code is sometimes slow, but I think this is worth to mention and propagate to the users.

I think all the above are interesting and will please many Quanta Plus users.

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