Wednesday, April 22. 2009Facts about Rosetta and Kubuntu l10nFacts
Rants Import Having to import all main applications' l10n related data to a distribution specific tool for enhancement and bug fixing is a completely sane thing to do. Of course, if the whole process would not be bound to the build process (i.e. if it could be supervised outside the build process) it would be a lot easier to notice/track/find issues, and god knows there are loads of those (at least for KDE imports). It probably would also help if rosetta wouldn't need ages to process the data for import. But hey, what can you do, it's a bottlenecked design. So, assuming that the data ended up properly in Rosetta (which is not always the case, though it arrived there ... I guess you can imagine what I'm talking about), now a nice community member can start fixing bugs or enhance the translation (to pick up on the bottleneck: if the template is imported but the po is not, there will be loads of untranslated strings ... again I'm quite confident that you see the implication here). ---Let's use the following example: Leon is Kubuntu user. He is speaking German and wants to help translate KDE. Being a user who actually knows about the need of translation he knows that the translations are being handled over at Launchpad. So he commands to konquer launchpad.net. Right at the top there is a link to Translations. Leon clicks. On the translations main page he finds a link to the translations for Ubuntu 9.04. Again he follows that link. Oh dear, what a load of red!!!! Anyway, he scrolls down and eventually finds german. So far so good, now Leon just needs to find some KDE application. Hum... Leon reads kdesktop and kicker, having used KDE for quite some time he knows that this stuff was replaced in KDE 4 and is not even available in the archives anymore, so he avoids them, luckily they are fully translated anyway. On the very same page he finds konqueror with one untranslated string. He thinks that one untranslated string would be a perfect starting point so he wants to give it a shot. Our character filters for untranslated items having no clue what the guide filter means as there is only none or german.
The suggested translation "Textmarken" from openoffice's translations sounds about right so he applies that. For those who don't know, the KDE default translation for bookmark in german is "Lesezeichen", Leon doesn't know that, and neither does Rosetta. JohnTooray suggested "Lesezeichen" but that was almost 2 months ago, so one must assume it was not very much liked, so for the scenario's sake we will just ignore that there is already a suggestion.
Leon submits his suggestion "Textmarke" and goes on walking through >20 pages of templates trying to find more KDE stuff to translate. [timelaps] 3 months later still no one approved his suggestions (in Rosetta someone from the managing team, i.e. the ubuntu translation team for $language, needs to approve the translation ... those poor people have to know all common translations for GNOME, KDE, GNU, $someothersoftwarestackinmain). Leon is right now pretty pissed off and decides to never try helping again.--- I hope you see the flaws I tired to highlight, in that very simple example use. Those are mostly non-technical problems, I have talked about the technical ones so often on IRC and in various meetings that I am simply tired of repeating myself all the time. Export If we are super lucky someone didn't decrease the translations quality and the language teams were not too busy fighting with Rosetta's interface to not be able to approve new suggestions. At some point (post string freeze, so someone like Apachelogger, who would actually care if import and export are working correctly before that, doesn't have a chance to fix quirks before translators start working there arse off) a ubuntu langpack gets generated and spit upon the archives.Communication Ubuntu must be high on something since it seems pretty much impossible that Ubuntu and Kubuntu communicate just for once. It goes like that: Ubuntu does something -> Kubuntu notices it -> hell breaks loose -> Kubuntu tries to catch up -> Kubuntu barely (read: only partially) manages to catch up before release. That seems to be some kind of law of nature.Latest example: "lets go rape our packages of their desktop file translations" which was done less than one month before release of 9.04 without any warning. Result: Systemsettings was speaking english most of the time, so did the menu, so did loads of other stuffCause: The Kubuntu patch for grabing desktop file translations from .mo files was not working + the translations were not imorted + the templates were not imported + no-one ever warned us This isn't news at all. A flickr image set is watching the progress of Kubuntu since 8.04 (though it is, with exception of 8.10, mostly tracking in-development progress, then again how much localization QA can you expect when it is horribly broken half the time). Also if you speak german you might want to check out the latest KDE-de thread about Kubuntu's state of translation, they also had a similar one for 8.10, where they considered various crude but understandable actions in how to handle this issue. After all the KDE l10n teams probably get most of the complaints, because the user is lead to believe that it's a problem there. Conclusion So, finally just let me get my position straight.
 Thursday, April 2. 2009Project Neon: KDE Nightly Edu++ GGadgets++
If I had more time for blogging I would do more blogging... but I don't have
 Quick update: Newly available in Project Neon's kde-nightly is kdeedu (i.e. kde-nightly-kdeedu). Newly available in the kdebase build is support for Google Gadgets (using GGL SVN from yesterday). Upcoming is Quassel (which got KDE integration) as well as the return of MSN in Kopete.   Thursday, April 2. 2009choqoK - twittering fun
I am glad to announce that choqok my most favorite Twitter client (well only for a week or so
 is now available for Kubuntu Jaunty as well as Intrepid-backports (a.k.a. unsupported updates).I must admit choqoK looks very promising and can probably also become a very awesome non-twitter micro-blogging client. I guess the lead developer could use some help, so if you get a minute or two: check it out and maybe come up with some feedback or even a patch or a piece of translation or a handbook...  Have fun with 0.2 meanwhile.  Thursday, April 2. 2009To the Batcave!<jontheechidna> You should do a seminar "Rapid debian package deployment with ruby"  (Click for bigger awesome)  Thursday, April 2. 2009Qt Firefox
Due to the KDE Dot interview about Qt Firefox I (as a Kubuntu guy) felt pretty challenged....
me@apoc { ~/moz }$ ls -lah | grep deb That's all for now  Thursday, April 2. 2009Can't you hear the drums?
You know the tension before something huge happens? Like when Luke faces Darth Vader, or just the minute before Batman chooses to make Harvey Dent a hero in exchange for his own reputation, or when Frodo is supposed to throw the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom.
That is what I am experience more and more with every day that passes by.  ^ that is a clicky link, by the way  Thursday, April 2. 2009I am disappearing
Due to new employment (Zivildienst) I'll be unable to continue my work on the various projects I am a proud contributor of. Well, until mid-October at least.
I'll most likely not be able to follow mailing lists, nor will I be online on IRC when I am not really available. If you want to reach me, you better drop me a mail personally... the inbox is pretty much everything I kind of read. Should you be lucky enough to actually get a hold of me: don't expect me to do or say anything useful By 2010 I should be able to attend conventions and fairs again, so you can worship me live and in action So long...  Thursday, April 2. 2009Monthly changing wallpapers? ... aye!
While KDE 4 is shipping with awesome default wallpapers, I still find myself at times facing the problem that they become boring after some weeks. At the same time being developer and all it is difficult to keep up with latest wallpaper trends, also partly due to the fact that I simply can't watch kde-look for hot new stuff. So I said to myself (due to continuing lack of people to drop my ideas at
) maybe having the wallpaper switch monthly via a remote resource would make sense. Well, that is how I came up with Kubuntu Wallpaper of the Month (kubuntu-wotm). Now, while this would be a nice feature for Plasma itself, due to me being a self-centered distro developer (and not being qualified for Plasma hacking anyway) I decided that doing it via a package makes more sense for the time being (+ it has the advantage that our update-notifier queries the repos anyway).Don't let me bore you though. Bottom line is: we need a team of people with taste for good wallpapers and the time to select a good one every month, to get monthly new wallpapers for Kubuntu. If you are constantly looking for hot new wallpapers anyway, joining the team and helping people like me, who are totally incapable of finding good wallpapers at all, would probably improve your karma quite a bit  Please poke me on IRC, leave a comment, or drop a mail to apachelogger@kubuntu.org ... Since we just talked about this a bit on IRC: I could also imagine that we make a collection of wotm wallpapers available in the official Kubuntu archives (e.g. wallpapers of the last 12 months). That way you can also have a nice collection of wallies for slideshowing, updating everytime you upgrade to a new Kubuntu release  Thursday, April 2. 2009It is Qt...
...unless you are talking about Quick Time.
 Thursday, April 2. 2009Project Neon: neonmake
I totally forgot to blog yesterday :-S
Anyway, since the first day of Project Neon, there was neonmake. You might be wondering what neonmake is, though if you read all the other blog posts about Project Neon you probably know that I will explain it as following: neonmake is a wrapper around make, ensuring all environment variables are set as necessaryThat however doesn't really describe it very well, in theory neonmake should be called amarok-nightly-kde-nightly-cmake-make-sudo-make-install, which of course is far too long Well, let's get through it step by step. neonmake consists of 3 parts - neonmake, make.sh and varsrc
to sum that up:
Now you go play with neonmake and I have to rest from this post.  Thursday, April 2. 2009A breath of fresh air for Konsole Oxygen thingy of the day: Konsole Color SchemeI'd still like to get some feedback on the color composition so give it a try. Currently only Nightrose (aka Lydia) tested it, and usually her display's colors are way off .Lydia also states that it rocks with irssi, but who uses that thing anyway? Grab it today and get your Konsole a breath of fresh air. BTW: apparently it takes some time to get used to it, but once you did, it is quite awesome to work with this color scheme  Thursday, April 2. 2009The Awful KHelpCenter
Today I did a little bug hunt (that's where you actually search for the bugs and then kill them int he most hackish manner
And KHelpCenter made me cry, seriously... It's still using the crystal icon all over the place:  It's main content is for some reason missing icons:  Remember this pic:  Notice anything?  Note the upper right in the following  Glossary has an as awesome icon issue open content uses help-contents, closed ones should use contents2 (crystalsvg name of course, and an oxygen replacement never got requested apparently :S)  Content of the Glossary then did it and made me cry  At least I got search index....  ...strange that it doesn't work even though the index builder said so   First off: I didn't report these issues yet, because bugs.kde.org only offers versions up to 3.5 and unspecified, now I can't really use unspecified, right? Things I was wondering: Why does khelpcenter still use htdig? Wouldn't Strigi/Nepomuk would be better for that kind of job? Does the index builder need to make me think it succeeded? Does everything have to look so broken? Is khelpcenter actually maintained? Meanwhile I understood that none of the answers is important anyway .... we, KDE, as a community should just go fix these issues. I already did a start  Thursday, April 2. 2009DBug
What is better than Akademy?
... inGardenWithCoffeeHaXX0ring(tm) Nowadays everyone is obsessed with debugging, including me, this obsession leads to the urge of having debug packages for each any everything. So, while half the KDE crew was listening to talks due to leak of power supply I was working on debug packages for Project Neon (i.e. kde-nightly and amarok-nightly) and I think the Neon PPA doubled its size. Now you can install amarok-nightly-dbg which is pulling in a complete debug stack for amarok-nightly. In addition to that you also get a new script called amarok-nightly-debug which wraps around amarok-nightly-vars and gdb. Basically the same applies for kde-nightly, but kde-nightly-dbg will only pull in the necessary dbg packages rather than the complete stack (just like kde-nightly). There is no wrapper script yet, but kcrash takes care of almost everything anyway If you have time, please take the dbg packages for a testcrash and complain if it fails to crash ... err... to trace the crash And tomorrow I'll tell you about a script I created months ago and used it yesterday for the first time.   Thursday, April 2. 2009About Help, Wikis and Firefox Qt
Busy days, like really busy....
First things first. KHelpCenter looks less awkward:  It now uses the help-browser icon instead of the old crystal one. The style templates are fixed, glossary now also comes with KDE 4 style and the old introduction stuff got removed completely.Kicker applets stuff was removed in favor of Plasma (which also got an icon . In general all icons are now fixed (well, some quirks with the main items are still remaining).KCModules (i.e. the thingies for System Settings and KInfoCenter) are added to their categories. I also came to think about improving the general experience. In my opinion the interface should be redesigned making the search a central part (considering nepomuk/strigi usage gets implemented), there is really no way I would want to browse docs manually in the year 2008 . Also using Phonon and KHTML/QWebKit a much greater use of online content should be considered (e.g. screencasts).About the written online content we also had a discussion today. Essentially a lot of the documentation is outdated, no wonder thinking of the amount of applications and features, so really no one's fault here, still we should improve the situtation. Current proposal: using a wiki for ongoing documentation, then take snapshots for proof reading by the responsible developers and then let translators do their magic. Eventually even do the translation in the wiki? I certainly think with this approach we should only ship a very basic amount of documentation with KDE and access the remaining parts online. I think Windows' help does it quite the same way in that it includes the MS support database, well at least I think it does. If anyone wants to get loads of karma, he/she may step up and start work on KHelpCenter, I really think there is great potential for this application. ------- Another really cool thing: work on a new wiki.kde.org started (whichmakes me quite happy since the current one was always kind of not-working when I needed something). The best thing about it is that it got OpenId (alsa known as 'I-only-need-one-login') support, which goes very well with the OpenID support in Amarok's web infrastructure. The thing is: we need you! you, dear reader Content from wiki.kde.org needs to be reviewed and selected for migration or dumping (later on moving and updating seems to be on the todo). So, if you have some time and want to help KDE get a new shiny wiki -> join #kde on irc.freenode.net and poke Jucato ------- Meanwhile I got firefox-qt to work (at least until you press any buttons...), head over to Jonathan's blog for more information.  One note about the used archive though: this archive is meant for very expermiental packages (Intrepid users will find mozilla-plugin-plasma for example). By experimental I don't only mean the software itself but also the packages, e.g. there is no guarantee that firefox-qt will be named firefox-qt once it is in the offical archives.Therefore I suggest to be very careful which packages get installed from this archive, I would even go so far that you should remove it once you installed the desired software and check for updates yourself.  Thursday, April 2. 2009Comparing KDE 3 with $SOMETHING
I just (again) noticed how different KDE 3 and KDE 4 really are.
In the latest issue of Full Circle (Ubuntu/GNOME focused online magazine, still very recommendable!) theming of KDE 3 and GNOME were compared at page 26. Now this doesn't make any sense because theming is a useless thing in KDE 4, Oxygen is just too awesome to theme it away But seriously. All 4 mentioned points aren't like that in Kubuntu's KDE 4 anymore... I hope I am allowed to quote Lance. If not: he may poke me in the eye, thus slow down release preparation of KDE 4.1.1 1. In order to theme the login manager you have to install KControl. Why is this not already available in the Look and Feel?  There is still a little quirk (or actually a rather big one) since you can't get root access easily. I hope to get that resolved before Intrepid. 2. The GRUB boot loader can be themed, but again, it's not an option by default in KControl. Why does it require an application to be installed?  In Intrepid we will most probably ship Kgrubeditor by default allowing you to restore a broken GRUB from the Live CD and of course theming when installed. 3. After downloading a theme, there is nowhere to apply it unless you know that it can be dragged and dropped on top of the settings window, or that you can go to the command line and use KControl. I guess you are talking about theme packages. Support for these vanished from KDE 4.1 and IIRC they never worked properly anyway, eventually they broke more settings than they actually themed. 4. I also had to install Ksplash to change and theme the splash screen just after login, but before you hit the desktop.  I guess that is an improvement over KDE 3? ...now back to the batcave (don't ask, it's top secret)  |
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