Qt5/KDE Frameworks porting steps

As I said in my last post I would elaborate about how porting of libkeduvocdocument (name pending currently) from Qt4 and kdelibs4 to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks happened.

Commits can be seen here but it went like this:
1. Change CMakeLists.txt to look for frameworks and Qt5 packages.
2. Try to build, fix any errors. All while checking the Porting Notes.
3. Port away from deprecated methods.
4. Port away from kdelibs4support.

I forget which part of the above involved each of these, but this is what was changed:
Ported from KUrl to QUrl.
Ported from KStandardDirs to QStandardPaths
Ported from KGlobal::locale() to QLocale
Ported away from other deprecated methods and classes.

So rinse and repeat until it's in a state where you are happy with it.
Note that step 4 above isn't strictly necessary, and is similar to porting Qt4 applications away from Qt3Support (Some kde4 applicationss never were ported away from Qt3Support sadly...) Yes KMouth, I'm looking at you.

Libkeduvocdocument Qt5/KDE Frameworks port

Hello all. Yes I'm still alive. Yes I'm still doing KDE stuff as I find time or make time. I'll report in the next few posts about what is happening and where we are going.

One of the things that happened recently was the port of libkeduvocdocument to Qt5 and frameworks. Vishesh started the effort, and I completed it with some review by Aleix Pol. It was decided as documented here that since libkdeedu only contains libkeduvocdocument it should be split up. Upon further investigation we realized that the other parts of libkdeedu are not used anymore. Besides the icons subfolder that are still looking for a home, the rest of the git repo is only libkeduvocdocument related, so we decided to just rename the git repository for the frameworks and going forward release. So the libkdeedu git repository holds the kde sc 4 codebase, while the libkeduvocdocument git repo holds the qt5 and frameworks based code. Both contain the history so all history is preserved. 

I'll write next time about the steps taken to port the library to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks.

Watching Frederik go

This week I haven't done much, but it seems like lots has happened. Probably because the checkins in keduvocdocument were many and a lot changed. Thanks to Frederik for taking on the ugly conjugation class, and for making an identifiers class, as well as fixing kvoctrain issues that the changes in the library caused (Sorry about that fregl.)

Not sure if anyone cares, but in the kde diplomacy game on phpdiplomacy.net we are down to the final 4 players, and it seems sides have been taken. Groundferret (Germany) and I (France) have made war with SaroEngels (Turkey) and his brother haldir (Austria).

On the kde4 testing front (informally only for now) CPgmrSw2 (sorry, I butchered your nick) noticed about a month ago that shortcut keys were not working in kde 4 for some reason. We looked into it a bit at the time, but couldn't find any solution (or what the problem was for that matter.) This last week Seli got back from vacation, and when we mentioned it to him Mattias Kretz said his were working fine. Then we found his was working ok when launched from kde3, so we tried various combinations of kde3 and kde4 sessions with kde4's kwin window manager. Mikmak of yzis fame found the problem had to do with KGlobalAccel's going away when kded encountered problems. I found a way to get it working on my system by pointing kde4.dekstop at a small shell script that sets up my environment with kde4 paths, and then executing kde4's startkde. (I can finally Ctrl-F8 to get the desktop grid-effect, and alt-tab with composite, yay!) Mikmak also had success by removing old plugins from his KDE4/libs folder.

Can't think of anything else for this week, but I'll probably think of something this weekend (and hopefully get some hacking done also to report about.)

P.S. thanks to all those that responded to either my last post or annma's e-mail and helped translate/update khangman/kanagram data files. It's great to be part of a community so willing to help each other out.

Share and share alike

Well, I just finally made my last commit to KHangman to make it use the same folder for its kvtml files as KAnagram. It's been a long time coming, but I think it was well worth the effort. Now both KHangman and Kanagram have access to each other's translated data files (ping me on irc if you speak another language and would be willing to do other translations ;-). And also have access to any files downloaded through KHotNewStuff from either application. Kanagram benefited because KHangman has quite a few translations of its files done, and KHangman benefitted because KAnagram has 17 files in each language that has been translated (except Chinese which has only 14 so far, but they are huge!). All of both applications data files have also been converted to the new kvtml 2 xml format that is actually human readable, thanks to the changes in the library, and Frederik Gladhorn and Peter Hedlunds great design. Last week also saw much improvement in libkeduvocdocument by Frederik making things understandable, etc. cleaning out old code and fixing things to be more flexible (you can rename the verb-type now if you like!)

My computer is back up to snuff running Feisty again and it's great to be back. Last week was one of lost KDE productivity with the backup, re-install, restore, checkout, rebuild... But it was nice to do a build from scratch again installing libs as necessary.

On the Kompromise front, kleag, the KSirk maintainer has contacted us in #kde-diplomacy about some possible sharing of network code, and map drawing code, which will be a great benefit I think.

computer issues, Danes, and diplomacy

Well, this week Ann-Marie came back! We had lots of stuff for her when she got here, and she hopefully will have a bit more hacking time tomorrow sounds like. She also got to meet all the new folks that have been hanging out in #kde-edu since she left (groundferret, SaroEngels, timlinux, etc.) Interestingly, since she's been back more females have been in that channel than the whole time she was gone (kdeb, hannascott, etc.)

I've been debating downgrading back from gutsy (beta ubuntu) to feisty (latest ubuntu) all week, and finally made the decision when I couldn't get nvidia X drivers working anymore in gutsy. Backed up all my personal code, pictures, music, videos, etc. to the my local web-server and re-installed feisty. It's nice to have a clean new install to play with again, even though I know I'll do something to ruin it soon enough... :)

Thursday saw more Danish people on irc than I'd noticed previously. Terrax (hope I remebered your nick right) seems enthusiastic about helping with translation, but apparently Danish translation is/has been a one-man job lately (no mailinglist or website) but Kris Thomsen who translated kanagram's data files into Danish for us also has interest in translation, so maybe it's the beginnings of a translation team.

Lastly a couple weeks ago groundferret got a few of us started on Diplomacy which is a risk-esque strategy game set in Europe. You can see the game here. It's a pretty fun and interesting game, and has prompted the beginning of KDiplomacy a new kdegames project to make a networked diplomacy game for KDE.

Anyway, as for progress, what with my computer issues I haven't done much kdeedu stuff this week. I plan to remedy that by finishing the conversion of khangman data files to kvtml 2 format, and modifying them to have the words hints in the comment tag instead of the first translation tag. Hopefully I can fix the crash I introduced to khangman also... :)

Anyway, hopefully the weekend will make up for a less-productive kde week ;-)

hacking and real life(tm)

Had a great weekend with lots of collaboration, discussion, and hacking in kde-edu saturday and sunday. Kvtml version 2 is now what all apps that use it write with. There's a method to get around the KNS inability to put stuff in sub-folders. A sorting method to put files into sub-folders by locale.

We the folks of #kde-edu decided we want to get kde-edu.org completed by the kde 4 release since it is geared towards students and teachers, wherease edu.kde.org is geared towards developers of educational software. With lots of links to the simpler site from the dev site. Danny is working the design a bit, then we need to fill it with content on each app.

A bit of Real Life (tm) hit monday evening, so not much was done kde-wise. I did get nvidia drivers working in gutsy finally yesterday though, by using the older kernel, so now kwin is much faster again.

Anyway, hopefully this weekend keduvocdocument will get a lesson class for kvoctrain to use later, and kanagram's kvtml editor will get some polish. Then I'd like to play with some plasmoids to learn plasma and get going on Danny's svn world view plasmoid.

P.S. I got khangman using kvtml 2 files from the shared location, but it's a bit weird. Annma if you read this, I hope you'll be back by the planned feature freeze August 26th, so I can ask you a few questions. :)

Intro for Planet, and status

Hello everyone,

Chris Lee added me to planet.kde.org today, so I thought I'd introduce myself to those that may not know me (I'm pretty well known by now in #kde-edu.) I'm Jeremy Whiting, and I've been working for Scientific Toolworks, Inc. for over a year and a half now. When I started the company had decided to use Qt as its cross-platform toolkit. Anyway, long story short, a I learned Qt from work, and a few months ago started asking where I could help with the kde4 porting efforts on irc. I submitted a couple patches, then made kanagram use svg to scale itself. I soon thereafter became kanagram's maintainer, and have added support for kvtml 2 files to libkdeedu with Frederik Gladhorn's guidance and suggestions.

For those that do know me, I've been spending the past couple days planning out my todo list for the release, besides getting chinese kvtml files for kanagram/khangman/kvoctrain/kwordquiz to share from new friends in #kde-cn. I'd like to get khangman using the shared "share/apps/kvtml/locale" kvtml files by the time annma gets back soon. And I hope after that to be able to get a helper method in keduvocdocument to sort files downloaded from KNewStuff to their appropriate locale sub-folder.

When Pete get's back and gets playground/edu/habitat app and room classes working, I'll finish the component class and start making the basic components. I'll also be working on a plasmoid for Danny that shows the svn checkins by region using his developer region data, and the marble with a plain map. These will both be in playground for a while, but will be exciting to bring to fruition.

P.S. It's been great so far to get to know the few kde devs I've met in irc so far and to be apart of this great community.

Germans and Chinese

Weird topic, but that's the people I've been meeting lately on IRC. Last week I kept introducing myself to people on kde-edu and kde-windows. Each one I'd ask where they are from and look on marble to see where they live. Every person I talked to that day lived in Germany. Since I've been trying to get people to translate Kanagram data files for the last while, I asked them to do German translations for us, and Saro Engels did the translation for us.

Then a couple days ago I met another (part?) German living in California that has a liking for British spelling, so he "translated" Kanagram and Khangman data files into en_GB for us. I think he has the record so far for fast translation, he did all 17 Kanagram files, and 3 KHangMan files in about 2 hours :)

Finally, last evening, I discovered #kde-cn when I did a channel search for kde on freenode. So I got on and practiced my degraded Chinese and learned a couple simplified characters in the process. Having learned traditional Chinese characters and trying to read simplified characters is a bit like learning how to read cursive first, then trying to read block print. Anyway, I met some friendly kde-enthusiasts there, asked them about how to make Kanagram useful to them, since chinese words are only one or two characters long. I had the idea that we could make a data file of idioms to unscramble, as most of those are whole sentences, or at least 4 characters in shortened form. They had the brilliant idea of using well-known ancient Chinese literature like lines from Tang Poems to unscramble. One high-school student volunteered to take some and make data files for me, since he knows xml a bit. Thus the first chinese kvtml file was checked in to kde svn thismorning :) I put it into zh_CN and zh_HK since both use simplified Chinese characters. I think I'll fire up the simplified to traditional perl script I have and make traditional files for zh_TW also soon.

Anyway, in other news I'm about done with the kvtml 2 support library, and have been focusing on converting kvtml files to the new format and fixing issues in Kanagram. I also planned out the architecture of Habitat today with Danny and Pete. Pete is going to do the room class(es) and I'll do the Component class(es) since I need to learn plasma data engines anyway for Danny's svn commit location plasmoid and to one day make a small anagram plasmoid out of kanagram's game class.

More boring progress

My wife read my blog the other day. Needless to say, she thinks I'm more dull than she did before ;)

Anyway, yesterday was a state holiday to celebrate pioneers that first came to Utah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Day_(Utah) . So I got the day off of work and spent the day at home (not really anything pioneer related at home, but it was hot outside). I spent most of the morning doing some more work in kdeeducore library on kvtml 2. The rest of the day was spent playing video games, and watching a movie with my brother.

As far as kvtml 2 goes, now the reader is almost done, except for a couple crucial parts I'd like to ask Frederik about before I proceed, and the writer has progressed to the point that I can convert old format kanagram and khangman files to the new format. I've realized that kanagram has been missing me lately, as my todo is getting longer instead of shorter there. Well that's enough rambling for one post I think.

Kvtml Progress

Well, another couple weeks have passed, but hopefully this will be more frequent as I am doing more now and thus have more to write about.

First of all, thanks to Frederik Gladhorn and Peter Hedlund, we have a good design for the next version of xml to store vocabularies in (kvtml version 2). I've spent a good part of my evenings this week working on the reader for it, and only have a couple hangups so far that I'll need to ask help understanding what they are supposed to do. I hope to start the reader tomorrow and get it to the point that it can write the basic tags that are in kanagram and khangman's data files (information, entries, and identifiers). When I get that far I'll make a small test app that reads kvtml files, and writes kvtml v2 files for testing, and for scripting the conversion of all of kanagram's data files to the new format. Yes, the old format is still supported, but writing will hopefully all be done using the new format, assuming all goes well with the writer ;)

In other news, I think I met 5 or 6 kde people from Germany this week. I even was able to convince one "Saro Engels" to translate kanagram's data files into german for us. I also added credits to the translators I know about in kanagram's about info (Pino Toscano for Italian, Kris Thomsen for Danish, and now Saro for German.) If anyone knows who did the ca, es, or gl translations, please let me know (As if anyone reads my blog anyway...)

Until next time...