This entry is rather belated, but it's been a busy few days for me. :)
On Saturday, we held the first Frameworks 5 community day on IRC. It was organized by Kevin Ottens and he did a great job of making it happen. David Faure, myself and others showed up to help people get up to speed with Frameworks 5 hacking.
It was really nice to see some new faces in the channel along with people who we have already come to know and love. :) Some attendees spent much of their visit getting their development and build environment set up and working. Others go to work on specific tasks in the code, while yet others started in on modularizing libraries that still needed it.
Personally, besides fielding questions in the channel and trying to help Kevin as I could, I worked on libkwindowsystem. This new modular library pulls the KWindowInfo, KWindowSystem (both from libkdeui) and Plasma::WindowEffects classes and their various helpers into a single library. It also resulted in some classes that had been previously exported in libkdeui becoming private: nothing was using them anywhere except by the window system classes!
There is one more class I'd like to target for similar privatization, but it's currently used by KMenuBar for global menu support. However, I believe this is obsoleted by the global menu support in Qt 4.8 and newer and if so then KMenuBar will not need this functionality in Frameworks 5. In turn that will mean another class (and perhaps even 2!) can be pulled from libkdeui as completely unused. It may also mean that KMenuBar itself is no longer needed and can be moved into a deprecation support library for Frameworks 5. We'll see how this shakes out,
In any case, the first Frameworks 5 community day was a real success, even if I was a little busier and more distracted than I wanted to be on the day it was held. Major respect for Kevin on seeing this through! We'll be doing more of these in future and you can hear about them here on our blogs (and hopefully elsewhere, too) as they are scheduled. You can also check out the Frameworks Community wiki pages which have all sorts of great details on tasks, progress and planning.
Getting involved with these days is a great way to help ensure that we get a quality set of libraries together in a reasonable time frame that we can call KDE Frameworks. :)
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2 comments:
Aaron,
I am a Indian scientist working in a government organization. The onus is to development technologies for nation growth and expectations are high as we are often told to complete and outperform colleagues from countries having long development period in modern science practise.
The question has another aspect which I read from pinguy's comment about KDE in one of the razor-qt discussion forum and shares general philosophy of development. He was expressing that there are duplication of libraries between KDE and qt (like qtlibs and kdelibs) which can be understood from the evolution of these projects. Technology has to evolve and we do development for it. However it needs modernisation which involve lot of mixing and matching and elaborate testing. To me it appears that either shelf life is less or we are not fast enough. (I keep reading all comments like this for our work.)
Mac introduced modularization and graphics capability, may be my perception is off the reality, and got lot of publicity and fans. Is opensource development slow because a lot of discussion for convincing people has to take place.
I do not want to sound disrespectful or impolite. I am asking a veteran about his perspective or experience on a grand scheme of things.
I had a great time helping out with the Frameworks stuff on Saturday. Getting Frameworks building was painless (apart from frequent commits breaking the build). Having small Junior Jobs on the wiki made it easy to get stuck in and even simple things like porting from deprecated KDE classes to Qt equivalents gave me a good chance to see large amounts of the code base which really helps understand how it fits together.
Thanks Aaron, Kevin and especially David for setting this up and answering my questions.
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