Thanks to some help from the folks on #commits, you can now watch the KDE commits live on IRC on #kde-commits. At the moment this relies on parsing the kde-cvs mails, but if anyone with access to the server is listening, it is possible to talk to the bot directly which would make things faster and more reliable.

I'd prefer to announce following in you digest since it matters to nearly everyone, and I don't intend to spam all mailing list again. I submitted patches for bugs.kde.org which were comitted by Daniel Naber (thanks!).

Following are the changes done:

• The Query page now tries to combine the known functionality with more efficient use of space while keeping a visible separation of different query parts so specific options are easier to find and understand.
• The Bug List now features an alternative background color for all odd rows similar to what KMail offers, "Show Comments" button is now only showed when there're less than 10 hits, other small look changes.
• Full emails addresses should be no longer shown as long as one isn't logged in for avoiding abuse, affects "Add CC" list, "Show Votes" and "View Bug Activity". Let me know if there are still pages where full emails addresses are shown without one being logged in.

My next goal is finally offering an own useful help page instead the old standard one by Bugzilla.

A few people have asked me, what those "roaming user fixes" are all about. Please let me try to explain the current problem.

All KDE applications use the functions readEntry()/writeEntry() to store values into configuration files under ~/.kde/share/config. Mostly this is no problem, but as soon as hardcoded paths are stored, the application is bound to the given path and you might run into problems later.

Let's take as example the addressbook configuration file (~/.kde/share/config/kabcrc):

[Resource_E9zrABCiHc]
FileName=/home/deller/.kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf

This means, that as long as my home directory is /home/deller, I'll have no problems at all. But as soon as e.g. the system administrator changes (and copies) my home directory to e.g. /mnt/homes/deller, this path is wrong and I won't be able to access my addressbook any longer without reconfiguration of kaddressbook and all other apps which use similiar absolute paths in their configuration files. Esp. on workstations attached to big networks and with user home directories on NFS such situations might happen more often and the solution is pretty simple:

[Resource_E9zrABCiHc]
FileName=$HOME/.kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf

In this case, calling readPathEntry() instead of readEntry() will automatically expand $HOME to the full home directory path, and writePathEntry(/home/deller/.kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf) will store the string $HOME instead of "/home/deller" in the config file. This forth-and-back conversion happens absolutely transparent to the application and no other changes other than changing the necessary readEntry()/writeEntry() calls to the corresponding readPathEntry()/writePathEntry() calls are needed. The applications themself will use and see at runtime the current home directory only. writePathEntry() and readPathEntry() will change strings which contain the user's current home directory only. Other values are not changed and the functions will behave exactly as readEntry()/writeEntry() in this case.

One nice benefit of this change is of course, that you now will be able to copy your current & favorite KDE configuration (icons, default paths, font-configuration,...) directly to your best friend by just directly copying the .kde subdirectory :-)