ervin's piece of web

First KDE Frameworks 5 volunteer day

2012-02-13T00:02:24+01:00

You want to help us make progresses on KDE Frameworks 5... But you're not sure you're up to the job? You don't know what to look at or where to start? You're not sure what it takes to be a KDE Framework maintainer?

Fear not! We're thinking about you, and we will have the first KDE Frameworks 5 volunteer day next saturday.

Come and join us! Saturday February 18 on Freenode #kde-devel channel!

This day will be driven by Aaron Seigo (aseigo) and myself (ervin) from 10am to 6pm CET. Feel free to ping us on the channel.

We will be around to guide you answer all the questions you didn't dare asking to get yourself started on helping us with KDE Frameworks 5.

We're preparing tasks to allocate to volunteers, and they will range from the small self-contained code adjustment, to splitting your own KDE Framework out of kdelibs and becoming its maintainer. Eternal glory will be provided with any task package you pick, so don't hesitate anymore, it's your chance right now!

Remember Saturday, 10am to 6pm CET, #kde-devel on Freenode, be there, help our community!

Osnabrück KDE PIM Sprint 2012

2012-02-12T23:48:24+01:00

Just a quicky on "what I did this week-end".

And yet another week-end which went away like a blast... of course it was again the fault of KDE! I went all the way to Osnabrück to attend the traditional KDE PIM sprint. This one was a first for me despite the fact that it was its tenth edition.

My plan before flying in was simple and easy to remember: "Sit with David Faure and fix all his IMAP bugs". It turned out not that easy to apply in practice. Of course, there's always something unexpected... sometimes pleasant, sometimes not.

For the unpleasant part, we had a tough luck on Friday: David's travel wasn't smooth at all so he arrived only during the night, while I had a terrible headache during the afternoon and the evening which made me only able to triage bugs (and at a very slow pace even...).

The pleasantly unexpected event which turned me away from my initial simple plan was the presence of Christian Mollekopf and Björn Balazs. I work with Christian on Zanshin, and I already interacted with Björn quite a bit during the Forge 2011 for usability work... one plus one being equal to lots, we ended up having meetings to discuss the interaction schemes for Zanshin 0.3. I have to say I'm pleased with the results so far. There's still a few gray areas but I think we'll decide on those when we turn the ideas into code.

And for the IMAP support? Well let's say that despite the disturbances which turned me away from my plan, the bug count went drastically down. On arrival, there was a bit more than forty bug reports against the IMAP resource, and between the triaging and the bugfixes we worked on with David I'm now leaving the sprint with only twenty known bugs (also a couple will likely get closed shortly since patches are in the work).

And again, a fairly nice and productive sprint, courtesy of KDE. I looove this community!

Bye Bye 2011

2012-01-08T21:35:18+01:00

Didn't blog in a while... Indeed the end of 2011 was hectic lots happening (both at work and in the community) so almost no time to write about it. Despite Christmas and the New Year I didn't take vacations in December, I admit I'm now a bit tired.

Anyway, the last few months were awesome, as I said: lots happening. So let's take a look in this post at the latest endeavours I participated in be it technical or community work.

Akademy-fr / Capitole du Libre

The path leading to end of November has seen Benjamin Port putting quite some work in the organization of the very first Akademy-fr. It's been a very important event for the french KDE community.

This event was grouped inside the Capitole du Libre with an Ubuntu Party, a DrupalCamp and two tracks of conferences on Free Culture. As usual, the whole Toulibre LUG was a great support to organize such activities.

The first day, we managed to fit two tracks of talks in Akademy-fr itself, one oriented toward contributors, the other meant for users. It was a nice success overall even though we maybe suffered a bit from the user track of the Capitole du Libre for our own track. That's understandable and something to fix for later. We also had a booth where we demoed the different productions of KDE. Using one of the Exo-PC with Plasma Active on it was just great to attract people, it is also great to show such a device next to a Plasma Desktop powered computer as it helps illustrating how coherent thoses workspaces are together (activites being pervasive concepts, same widgets to operate the devices, etc.).

The second (and last) day of Akademy-fr and Capitole du Libre was dedicated to workshops and labs. I think it was a really nice idea and we should keep it for the next edition. There was a bit less attendance, such workshops are more involving and requires to engage more with the community so it's understandable they can be a bit more frightening. Still, it was just great to get people trained on how to make a proper bug report, how to make their own Calligra plugins and such.

Of course, the real plus of this event is that most of the french KDE contributors showed up, we also got "pure-Qt" french contributors around. Funnily, all of KDAB France showed up in the end. Anyway, it was really nice to gang with already known faces again, but also to finally meet some people we only heard of so far.

Thanks to the sponsors who made this event possible. Also, thanks to everyone who helped, held a talk, or simply attended: you made the event a success! Finally, I'd like to give a special thanks to Aleix Pol who traveled from Spain to talk about Akademy-es and KDE España (which are both nice inspiration for us).

PS: I finally uploaded the handful of pictures I took during Akademy-fr 2011

Zanshin 0.2.0

Lot's happened around Zanshin which led to its first proper release. Most notably it got its own website now, and we fixed bugs like crazies leading to the release of 0.2.0 the day before Akademy-fr (although the public announcement was done only the week after).

It's also interesting to see it picked up by packagers, and now it is available on most of the major Linux distributions and on Windows. Hopefully it will sooner or later reach Mac OS as well, it has been reported to build and run by a couple of users but there's no official packaging for it yet.

The community around Zanshin also grew a bit, with a couple of contributors gettings in. I'm looking forward to see their influence inside the project. Nice ideas floating around at the moment. We'll have to implement those ideas incrementally of course otherwise the next release will be one of those long cycles again but I'd love to see shorter cycles for Zanshin now.

KDE Frameworks

After a period of some slow down, the KDE Frameworks is picking up again. I volunteered to help with the stewardship of that effort which led to some discussions and the creation of a wiki to track KDE Frameworks state.

It's obviously still on-going so the wiki needs to be improved, but it helped quite a bit already in decision making and figuring out where we are headed and where we want to be.

On the people side, we're getting contributions in but more importantly as we make kdelibs more modular we're finding volunteers to maintain the newly created library. It think that beyond the technical side of KDE Frameworks this trend is a very important one to nurture.

Indeed, the number of maintainers in kdelibs has been only a few for a very long time, and even though we have people interested in it they don't necessarily commit to be maintainers. With the modularization it is apparently less scary to step up to take care of one of the modules created, they're well identified, have a given scope and so on. Less unknowns then leads to less fear.

I find interesting how the motivation for KDE Frameworks was mainly technical, but is apparently changing the structure of the community. My take is that it will lead to a somewhat similar organization to the Qt Project. Only time will tell anyway, but it's fascinating to be a direct witness of the on-going evolution.

KDE Toulouse & Monthly Hacking Sessions

The KDE Monthly Hacking Sessions are just running as usual, we keep having this monthly get together on saturdays people carrying on their work, but also having a talk or a workshop in the morning. Thanks to Benjamin Port and Jean-Nicolas Artaud strong involvement, this activity is more secure than ever not being completely dependent on me being available and relaxing constraints on my own schedule. Thanks for that guys! It helps the whole group having enough energy to undertake other activities (like the Akademy-fr above). Say no to burn-out, distribute work! :-)

We had less people attending the sessions at the end of 2011, probably in part because of Akademy-fr being around the corner by then. There was also some other factors but we have plan to fix that. January's session, held yesterday was the proof of the continuing interest in those monthly events, we had another of those high attendance rate of the good old days. It was even further improved thanks to Akademy-fr. Indeed, we met Romain Perier who attended the conference in November and we were delighted to have him motivated enough to volunteer for holding the workshop part yesterday, travelling just for the day to do it! Thanks a lot Romain! It was really nice to have you around, hope to see you soon again.

Toulouse University Involvement

Bad news there... this activity came to a halt. We saw it coming for a while, but last year was the last time our projects and teaching to run with the IUP ISI (the course of study whose director, Henri Massié, trusted us to do a good job there). Indeed, after a few years of political games (mostly driven from the ministry as far as I can tell), all the "IUP" type of courses of studies disappeared. The IUP ISI was one of the last to carry the torch...

I thought I'd just carry on with another course of study this year. But I have to admit this abrupt ending and the way it happened (nasty details I'll spare you) just hit my motivation more than I expected. So somehow I still have to recover from it, but I have some leads and potential contacts to maybe setup something again for 2012-2013. Let's see if I manage to revive that activity. Apparently, after seven years of efforts to nurture that collaboration, I'm back to square one. Challenge accepted!

On the brighter side though, I got invited to a whole day seminar in Paris early February to discuss and share with people on the topic of University/Free Software Communities collaboration for student projects and teaching. Nice opportunity to meet with people having similar aims and share on alternative setups to the one we had in Toulouse. Really looking forward to this event.

What's coming next?

Well, I don't plan much ahead and I'm not the type of guy taking "good resolutions" in january every year (I just try to improve as I go). Still... from the waves around me, my own motivation at the moment and some other factors I think I can forecast a bit of what's coming.

Obviously I expect new Zanshin releases, at least two. Zanshin 0.2.1 should appear soonish as mentionned earlier. And then we'll roll toward Zanshin 0.3 which will be the release where Zanshin gets more of the missing basic features making it really useful.

I also expect the first KDE Frameworks release. Quite some work needed still, but I have a target date in mind that I think we can reach... No, I won't share it yet. :-)

Maybe I'll also get through the necessary mourning and administrative steps to setup a new University/KDE collaboration in Toulouse.

And last but not least I expect our monthly sessions to go on as usual. It's just great to have a small team of people helping with the local promotion, I'd like to see it grow more to spread even more love. Despite the current team size it's very likely we'll pull another Akademy-fr, but this time truely focused on the contributors needs, while the end-user aspects would be completely provided by talks and workshops of the upcoming Capitole du Libre 2012.

And so that concludes my last look back at 2011. Time to look forward again, lots to tackle still. :-)

Forge 2011: Metalworkers Videos

2011-10-11T18:16:17+02:00

From September 29th to October 2nd, we had the yearly developer gathering of the Solid team in Madrid named Forge 2011. It's the perfect opportunity for metalworkers to meet and make plans for the year to come.

This year was especially interesting because we had an usability expert on board which is a good thing for us metalworkers. We spend most of the time stuck in the middleware, but we also end up integration and presenting our work in the workspace where it should be easy and pleasant to use. I'll cover that aspect in more details in a another post.

We also took some time to record a few videos, mainly a demo of a new feature and a couple of interviews with key people. Took me some time to put everything together, but it's now in a state where I can share them!

Dario on Power Management and Multi-Screen

In this video Dario shows a nice new feature implemented thanks to the collaboration between power management and the multi-screen support. This way we can put in place refined policies on when to suspend or not.

(if you cannot see the embed, direct link to video for you)

Björn about Usability

In this video, Björn Balazs our resident usability person for the sprint talks about his job and what he worked on during the sprint.

(if you cannot see the embed, direct link to video for you)

Lamarque about Network Management

In this video, Lamarque Souza covers the work started during the sprint to revamp the network management support in the workspace. We also learn a bit more from his early KDE involvement.

(if you cannot see the embed, direct link to video for you)

Dario on Power Management

In this video, Dario explains the history of power management support in our workspaces. He covers quickly the past and gives us more clues about what is about to land in the next release. He also talks about his take on the interesting innovations in the community.

PS: And yes, Dario is very tired in this video. We had to charge the battery of the camera, it went empty during the first take. So yeah, he actually meant "4.10" there's no plan for a "5.0" workspace yet. ;-)

(if you cannot see the embed, direct link to video for you)

Alex on being the New Solid Maintainer

In this last interview, featuring Alex host of the sprint and new Solid maintainer, I had to step up and be in front of the camera to conduct the interview... It was the last one, probably around 3 or 4 in the morning...

(if you cannot see the embed, direct link to video for you)

B-Side! What Happened Behind the Scene...

And last but not least, I kept quite a lot of the rushes and failed attempts. So I also put together a "B-Side" for the videos so that you can also witness the nice atmosphere we had during the sprint!

(if you cannot see the embed, direct link to video for you)

PS: I think there's a bit of the video which might not be clear, so I'll give a few words of explanation. When the red circle and arrow appear, look very closely in the circle. I'm actually crawling behind the couch to retrieve the remote control of the TV... I'm totally in stealth mode! Except that you can briefly see my hand which totally killed Alex's concentration. Apparently it looked like the Thing in the Addams Family. If you couldn't see it watch again, veeery closely, it's furtive! :-)

Zanshin 0.2 RC1

2011-10-10T22:35:23+02:00

A few weeks ago we released Zanshin 0.2 beta2, and I'm glad to announce the immediate availability of Zanshin 0.2 RC1. Except if any showstopper bug is reported, it will be the last stop before 0.2 final.

I'd also like to use the opportunity to report a few changes regarding contributions and adoption. We've seen tremendous activity on the packaging front since the previous release:

It is available for openSUSE and Gentoo as previously announced;
It is now available for Fedora thanks to Christoph Wickert of Kolab Systems, you can grab it from Christoph's repository and it'll hopefully get into Fedora itself soon;
I got pointed out that it was already available in Arch User Repository;
Kartik Mistry volunteered to package it for Debian, so we'll have some good news there soon hopefully;
Patrick Spendrin confirmed to me that it got added to the KDE-Windows port, and so it was officially released with the KDE-Windows 4.7.0 release;
On Mac? I got users building it for themselves reporting it to work, but no official packaging yet.

I'm glad to see so many people stepping up like that, bringing some GTD goodness wrapped in Free Software to more and more potential users.

And since some people pointed it out on my previous post, yes we need a website, screenshots and so on. We've been aware of it for a while, but we've been too busy working on the software itself. The feedback on Zanshin 0.2 beta2 didn't bring many issues, so we used the extra time to work on a website. It's not ready for prime time yet, but we hope to go live with 0.2 final.

If you want to get Zanshin from sources, the tarballs are available, at the same place than usual on files.kde.org.

And of course, you can still git clone kde:zanshin if you want the bleeding edge or if you wish to contribute to the code.

Now we're waiting a bit for your feedback. We have exactly one minor bug left in our list and the future website need some extra polish. Hopefully at this pace we won't need a 0.2 RC2.

Spontaneous Sticky Notes: KDE PIM Pain Points Sprint

2011-09-18T12:08:09+02:00

So, I'm sitting right now in the KDAB's Berlin offices for what's probably the last dozen minutes of the KDE PIM Pain Points Sprint (at least for me, the other guys still have a couple of hours in front of them). We have been silent so far about what was going on there, and so I will take the microphone for a couple of minutes. At least we didn't steal the thunder of the Woshibon guys (looks like they did a great job BTW looking forward for that to hit my desktop!).

If you follow my blog, you probably noticed that lately when I attend developer sprints I carry with me shoelaces, sticky notes and other materials to setup weird boards. When I arrived on thursday night, a surprise was waiting for me...

Yes, that neat whiteboard was waiting there to be conquered. I'm actually glad to see that it's slowly turning into an habit to have this kind of things in our sprints. The culture is getting there and that makes me happy. We're apparently ready to experiment with other techniques like the Innovation Games for instance (which we played for Platform11), etc. We'll see what I can find to keep that fresh for everyone. ;-)

Anyway, as you probably can figure out from the picture above, it wasn't taken on the first day but this morning. It started small, but as we were fixing issues we added more and more sticky notes, in a true flow base fashion... Since the pace was good enough we could tackle more than originally envisioned, of course we were also finding sub-issues or corner cases which required specific care.

In any case the amount of work done is impressive, I won't get into the details there, but if everything goes well (pending some backporting) the next 4.7 patch release should have a few nice nuggets around performance, migration and even a bit of usability (I found a fix for a performance issue which turns out to be also responsible for the message list loosing its selection from time to time... I know everyone serious at email hate that one).

From the picture above, you can also see that the "Done" lane turned out to be too small to fit everything (looks like we were pessimistic on the amount of work which could be done), and someone expanded it partly into the "In Progress" lane giving it this weird shape... It looks fat isn't it?

Well, fat... it's unlikely we'll turn up like that. There was so much focus on the work that we had to remind ourselves of stopping for food, hence a specific sticky note was inserted just for it. It's an important task after all! ;-)

And if you wonder what focus looks like, I'll leave you with a picture of our own Lord Volker of Akonadi slaying bugs.

Impressive isn't it? If you want to see a few more pictures, you can find them in the KDEPIM Pain Points Sprint Gallery available online. I didn't take many this time, but you'll see a few more people.

Now I should move back to the airport to catch my plane, see you later!

Zanshin 0.2 beta2

2011-08-31T17:54:49+02:00

Zanshin, the TODO application which helps keeping your mind uncluttered is back! After one month of waiting, we are delighted to announce the immediate availability of Zanshin 0.2 beta2!

The focus has been mainly on bugfixing, but we also did a couple of usability adjustments here and there. Also, thanks to the awesome Nuno Pinheiro, we have an application icon (previously we were just hijacking KOrganizer icon). This new icon is lovely, thanks Nuno!

The source tarballs are available, at the same place than the last time on files.kde.org. If you want to use it on openSUSE my repository has a package for Zanshin, but it's now also available on the KDE:Unstable:Playground repository. Last but not least! Zanshin is also now packaged for Gentoo. Thank you to Matija Suklje for working on it.

And of course, you can still git clone kde:zanshin if you want the bleeding edge or if you wish to contribute to the code.

You can also contribute by helping us reaching more users:

packaging Zanshin for your distro, we still miss big ones like Arch, Fedora or Debian/Ubuntu;
making sure Zanshin runs on MS Windows, apparently Patrick from the KDE-Windows team was toying with that during DS but I'm not sure how it went;
or making sure it runs on Mac OS (we're not aware of any effort on that platform yet).

Now we're relaxing a bit, and waiting for feedback to see what needs fixing for the next release. Depending on the defect rate next one could be 0.2 rc1. Looks like we're getting closer and closer from 0.2 final!

Desktop Summit: We're a family! ++5 years in one talk

2011-07-31T17:56:00+02:00

Only a few days left before the Desktop Summit 2011, I'm really looking forward to wander around in Berlin again. I'm excited and almost counting hours before my flight out on friday morning! Yes, I'll be there:

And I'm not just attending, I'm also giving a talk on monday during the afternoon (3:20pm to 3:50pm). It's titled "We're a family" and it's a look back at the efforts I put into a Community/University collaboration in Toulouse for the past few years. I had talks around that topic already for an Akademy, but this one is going to be special for two reasons.

First, it'll be much less about the organizational challenges such a collaboration carries than the human impacts it can generate. Here it'll really be about showing the bonds it created among the people participating in this collaboration, and the opportunities it created for the students in the community projects. It will also cover the local and global influences those students had on the community.

Second, the course of study where this collaboration was taking place is closing... Right now it's not yet clear if the students projects we had in the past will still be possible. So this talk is really a wrap up about what happened in Toulouse for the past few years, and probably a "goodbye". Even if we manage to create a new collaboration somehow, this talk marks the end of an era. That's why we tried and managed to line up several generation of students related to this adventure. We'll have a lot to share, but maybe not enough time for all the most juicy secrets. ;-)

So, if you're looking for some laugh, tears, and insights on such a Community/University collaboration, hopefully it'll be the right talk to attend. Don't miss it!

On my side I'm putting the finishing touch to the talk, and of course it'll be ready on time.

Zanshin 0.2 beta1

2011-07-25T18:21:29+02:00

We released Zanshin 0.2 alpha2 in May, it was about time we got our acts together to prepare another release. So today I'm happy to announce the immediate availability of Zanshin 0.2 beta1!

It is the result of further bugfixing and testing work. We got some feedback from early users of 0.2 alpha2 and it's been reflected in our bug hunting efforts.

Since the previous one was an alpha we still had the freedom to add a couple more features. The features introduced for that beta were rather non-intrusive though, the main ones are:

the ability to set categories on projects, todos inside such projects automatically inherit from those categories (greatly reduces the tagging needs);
the ability to synchronize collections directly from Zanshin;
and last but not least a Kontact plugin, now Zanshin can work embedded in Kontact (this one was actually a feature request, I didn't even think about it). :-)

Now that we're entering the beta cycle, we're also publishing source tarballs. Of course, I still produce packages to openSUSE, although for the time being they're only built against KDE:Unstable:SC, I'm waiting for kdepim 4.7 to hit other repos before supporting more. Those packages are available in my home:ervin repository.

And of course, you can still git clone kde:zanshin if you want the bleeding edge or if you wish to contribute.

We plan to release Zanshin 0.2 beta2 somewhat soon after the Desktop Summit. We're only in bugfixing and stabilization mode now, no new feature will be introduced until we release 0.2.

Enjoy!

Sprint in Randa: Done? Not!

2011-06-08T22:18:45+02:00

The developer sprints in Randa are officially over. I spent my first full day at home today, and it feels almost odd to be in my quiet office after all the energized atmosphere we got there during a full week.

Anyway, remember the Platform11 Kanban we setup on the first day? Well, here is how it looked on the last night:

I think we made "some" progress. And that's not counting the technical tasks which got handled in a separate Kanban. If we had another day I wonder where we would have put the done tasks. As you might notice on the picture above we simply reached the floor in the "Done" column. :-)

So, is everything said and done now? Well, not really, what we did really was putting into motion the on-going effort which will lead us to the first iteration of the KDE Frameworks. We tried to create the tracks in Randa, and I'm looking forward to get on the train for this exciting journey!