25th July 2003 by Derek Kite

This Week...

Find out who is paid to hack KDE. A new application, KLogo-Turtle, for teaching children. KPrinter adds access to on-line printer database. Kontact adds a to-do list plugin. A re-designed font installer. The beginnings of Kwallet. And many more features and bugfixes.
If you have been following this digest for a while, you no doubt have noticed that the same names keep coming up. Obviously some developers are able to spend quite alot of time hacking KDE. Having lived in an economically depressed area for the last 20 years, my habit has been to inquire as to peoples means of living. So, I asked Who is paid to hack KDE? I'm sure the list is incomplete, and I will get corrections, which I will pass on.
  • SuSE employs Waldo Bastian, Cornelius Schumacher, Stephan Kulow, Michael Matz, Lubos Lunak, Lukas Tinkl and Everaldo Coelho. Not all spend 100% of their time on KDE.

  • Automatix employs Zack Rusin, who enjoys 50% of his time on KDE. Holger Schroeder has the same deal.

  • Trolltech employs David Faure, who had 50% for KDE. Of course, the Qt framework is written and supported by Trolltech.

  • Eric Laffoon sponsors Andras Mantia to work on Quanta.

  • Bo Thorsen is contracted by Klaralvdalens Datakonsult AB

  • Marc Mutz was contracted by Intevation. Bo and Marc and Bernhard Reiter (among others) were working on Kroupware and Kolab, the groupware solution for the German government.

  • Arend van Beelen jr. by Auton Rijnsburg, who worked on Krdc.

  • Laurent Montel is employed by Mandrake

  • David Hyatt and crew are employed by Apple, and have contributed greatly to Khtml.
Not very many are there? This last week there were 163 different people who contributed to KDE, either as translators, web designers or developers, working on the various applications and frameworks that make up the whole package. The majority of contributors are volunteers. What can we take from this? If you use KDE, what are you doing to support those who do the work? Many developers could use hardware upgrades, even a bit of cash to make it to the developer conferences. Or we can support those who support the developers. Or sponsor someone so they can devote more time to the project. Check out www.kde.org/support for details. If I have missed anyone, or have incorrect information, please let me know.
In this commit, Tim Jansen refers to a discussion on kde-pim regarding KAgenda. Here is his comment, and links to screenshots:
I'd like to commit the attached patch.

It does the following:
  • complete redesign of the agenda item look with custom renderer
  • changes the colors (and renames the color groups in the preferences because the old colors look quite sub-optimal). Feel free to suggest better colors if you don't like them :)
  • uses lighter grid lines (#25261)
  • adds a pixel of spacing between items (otherwise it looks quite ugly with the new design)
To make it short, here's a screenshot:
http://www.tjansen.de/blog/pics/after2.png

For reference, here is the old renderer:
http://www.tjansen.de/blog/pics/before.png

This shows item changes only, with old colors and without other KOAgenda changes:
http://www.tjansen.de/blog/pics/after1.png
Cornelius Schumacher had some suggestions, which were implemented, and the patch was committed this week.
How and when error messages are shown can make a system confusing or easy to use. Either I really need to know about an error, or I don't (like the index version error I get in Kmail). So when David Faure removed a warning about chmod failing when the partition is an MSDOS/FAT/VFAT one, it seemed obvious. Why confuse the user. David reasoned as follows:
What's wrong with eating an error message when we know that
  1. the user can't do anything about it
  2. it's not such a big problem after all, just a stupid filesystem?
Koos Vriezen piped up:
Which reminds me of a college of mine wanted to (first time) install linux for his satelite receiver. Since he had to do some compiling for it and he didn't know how to use tar, he used ark. He de-ark'ed all packages on a vfat fs. Now guess what happened :-). Stupid ark doesn't give any warning about eg. symlink support...just tested with a vfat loop fs, quickly compiling kdeutils... and indeed it's true. Think about it...
David Faure responded to various concerns:
OK, let's not confuse a non-working chmod with no-symlink support.

Konqueror eats "couldn't chmod" warnings, but attempting to copy a symlink onto a windows partition gives a "could not create symlink ...." error (good) - which then says "Please check permissions" (not so good) :)

(Should I add a SupportsSymlink flag to the new method, to improve this error message?)

...

But if you move your $QTDIR to a fat partition temporarily, and then back, you're in BIG trouble (you lost all your include/ symlinks).

I'd prefer being able to abort the move if I'm doing something as stupid as moving my $QTDIR to a fat partition.

One should see a warning about symlinks not working only if he's going to actually copy symlinks.... Well this is doable, since CopyJob lists everything before it starts copying/moving stuff.
So a small adjustment for usability ends up with David going back to the drawing board.
Ariya Hidayat wrote regarding the top committer:
For the CVS digest, maybe it's worth to mention Chris' work-in-progress on new KOffice website - http://www.kde.org/areas/koffice/

This also explains his 32k lines of commits this week :-P
Chris Howell commented:
Hopefully should be finished now, and I've just finished setting up the API documentation so that it will be generated using doxygen rather than the old kdoc.

Hehe :) I've also ported printing.kde.org and am in the process of events.kde. org. Some of it can be done automagically by perl so it maybe isn't as much as it sounds ;)
The i18n.kde.org site wasn't available for the i18n statistics. Also thanks to Stephan Binner and Melchior Franz for their gimlet eyes.

Statistics

Commits 1373 by 163 developers, 349585 lines modified, 1743 new files
Open Bugs 4688
Open Wishes 4249
Bugs Opened 277 in the last 7 days
Bugs Closed 282 in the last 7 days

Commit Summary

Module Commits
kde-i18n
298
 
www
160
 
kdenonbeta
141
 
kdelibs
128
 
kdebase
117
 
kdepim
72
 
kdeextragear-2
45
 
kdemultimedia
37
 
kdevelop
33
 
koffice
29
 
Lines Developer Commits
31855
 
 Chris Howells
135
 
13033
 
 Dirk Mueller
53
 
1371
 
 Waldo Bastian
49
 
1091
 
 Christoph Cullmann
41
 
3852
 
 Rinse de Vries
39
 
248
 
 Helge Deller
31
 
1193
 
 David Faure
31
 
6300
 
 Andras Mantia
30
 
1362
 
 George Staikos
26
 
2104
 
 Cornelius Schumacher
24
 

Internationalization (i18n) Status

Bug Killers

No commits found

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