Gardening Recipes

You thought this would have something to do with working outside and/or cooking something. You were wrong.

As Albert blogged previously the KDE gardening team's love project this time is KRecipes.
The mailing list has been moved.
The website content has been added to userbase.
The 2.0 release is on upload.kde.org, soon to be moved into place (a new place since download.kde.org hasn't done a krecipes release before).

Anyone that would like a relatively small way to quickly help KRecipes out it could use some patches on reviewboard (group added, sending to the new mailing list already) to port away from Qt3support classes. Some other ideas off the top of my head also:

1. Make it use kunitconversion to convert metric units to imperial units for those of us stuck in countries that use imperial measuring systems.
2. Freshen up the ui a bit so it looks less like a database viewer and more like a recipe viewer/editor.

KDE Fundraiser 2014

In case you didn't hear, KDE is running a fundraiser which helps fund sprints and other expenses of your favorite desktop/applications/games brought to you by the KDE community. Plus there are cool konqi postcards!

Ok, back to your regularly scheduled blog reading, have a nice day.

Autostart in Plasma 5

In the past few days as I got more and more annoyed that git pushes and svn updates and commits were always asking for my ssh key password I looked at what the current status of plasma autostart is. When I set up my plasma 5 environment I copied all the scripts that were in ~/.kde/Autostart to ~/.config/autostart thinking they would "just work" there, but it turns out they don't. My needs are simple I only had two .sh bash scripts in there, one for running ksshaskpass to ssh-add my ssh key. The other to launch synergys on login. Both scripts showed up in the autostart kcm, but neither was getting launched at login time.

Digging a bit in the code of kinit and klauncher I found that when it looks at ~/.config/autostart it only looks for .desktop files. It turns out this comes from an xdg spec for autostart scripts. Ok, simple enough, so I removed my synergys.sh script and in the autostart kcm created a new autostart item that launches synergys for me at login time. Works like a charm.

Next I went to look at ssh-add using ksshaskpass (there's a kf5 port of ksshaskpass in kdereview now by the way, which works pretty well and has some small improvements from the kdelibs4 version). For one thing, files that aren't .desktop files in ~/.config/autostart aren't getting launched, because klauncher doesn't even look at them. To fix this the autostart kcm was modified to not show these anymore.

The other question then is where should plain bash scripts be put that users and sysadmins used to put into ~/.kde/Autostart ? One solution is to put them into ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/ . This is what I did here with ssh-add.sh and that works fine. The only thing to note though is that these are sourced, not executed, and they are sourced before plasma has started, so they can set environment variables and such if needed. This may not be ideal for scripts that need to talk to running services, so we may need to add something to ksmserver to launch scripts from ~/.config/ksm-autostart or something like that. There's a bug about it here https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338242 already, so don't file new bugs about this issue.