Thursday, June 23, 2011

update

Nearly half a year after my last blog post I just thought I would share some news with you.
First of all I became father of a cute boy in february - which limits my time (especially for KDE) quite a lot. Because of this I thought about stopping my work for KDE on Windows completely but I couldn't really live without it ;-).
This also means that our build server slowly stopped working in the past months. This is partly due to size constraints (one of the buildprocesses filled its quantum again) and due to a bug in jom which will only happen after quite some time.

One of the questions that comes up quite often is when we will have another binary release. The current plan is to release KDE 4.7.0 more or less together as all the Linux distributions and maybe add another release of KDE 4.7.X later this year.

Another big issue for us is the transition of our emerge build scripts to git. This brings multiple things with it that are no easy-to-solve questions:
At the moment we recommend that you install a svn client (e.g. TortoiseSVN is my personal choice) and checkout emerge. One of the ideas that came up were that we could easily distribute our scripts from now on as a tarballed git repository (and maybe bundle it with git & python executables).

At the moment emerge uses different categories for different minor versions of KDE, e.g. kde-4.X/kdelibs etc. With Git, we want to move that (at least in the future) into branches of emerge; This would make it possible to easily build & develop older versions of KDE without interfering with more up to date KDE builds.

Together with PovAddict, I already started some tests for the git transition (he ran the scripts etc, and I tested it ;-)) but we came across a problem that is probably singular to us:
KDE git repositories do not allow crlf files inside the repo so we need to translate all of our files to lf EOLs on the server. In our checkout, we need to have some files as crlf (think of batch files and patches) and some files as lf only (the python stuff). My guess at the moment is that we should turn
core.autocrlf=false
(which we already do) and at the same time add a .gitattributes file which contains
*.cmd eol=crlf
or something like that (if you have more ideas, please let me hear them).

So far for now, more information, especially on our google summer of code project this year (which is about the kdewin-installer). hopefully later.