Sunday, August 5, 2012

Waiting.

The KDE on Windows sprint meeting in Osnabrück just ended 2 hours ago and me and my colleague Andy are still waiting at the train station. The train to Berlin is now more than 2 hours late, so we decided it is a good time to write a summary for the sprint.
First of all we want to thank Andre Heinecke and Intevation for organizing a really nice sprint and giving us a place to hack and discuss.
This time we had 7 participants with a lot of different interests and backgrounds. Andre is maintaining the Kontact builds for Windows, Boudewijn Rempt attended to improve Calligra and Krita, Fabian Aichele showed us his work on integrating windows menus and shell actions with KDE, Andy Holzammer worked on several Qt5 on Windows related tasks, Patrick von Reth set up the new buildserver and worked hard to get mysql building with mingw-w64, Dominik Schmidt worked on cross compiling Windows applications under Linux with the help of OBS and I, I quote "have been slacking" (I worked to get emerge in a better shape).
The meeting started on thursday evening when Patrick & Patrick arrived already in Osnabrück. On Friday the rest arrived and we continued to discuss and hack. In the evening we had a nice dinner in a bavarian styled restaurant sponsored by KDAB, but just after dinner we went back to the office and hacked a bit more.
On Saturday we had a nice Introduction into Qt5 and its development process by Andy, I spoke a bit about KDE frameworks and how this will affect KDE on Windows. In the afternoon we had a google hangout together with Andrius Ribas who is based in Brazil and couldn't attend. Again we had a nice arabian style dinner which was sponsored by KO GmbH. This evening was a bit more of a social event, we had planned to make a release party (even before the KDE 4.9.0 release ;-)) and went to the unikeller just around the corner from the office. Just, as you would expect from hackers, we couldn't resist to go back to the office after that, and so last ones stayed until late in the night.
Today the day started obviously an hour later, but still we had two nice presentations from Fabian (lots of cool features for the KDE start menu and the file open menu in Dolphin) and Dominik showed us how to cross compile Tomahawk on Linux. Since Fabian had one of the longer journeys, he started first, and one by one all the participants had to leave. I hope that even if the journey might not work out as planned (I already heard that Patrick has been delayed in Düsseldorf until tomorrow), everybody will have a safe trip.
We all thank the KDE e.V., KO and KDAB for covering the trip and the hotel costs and of course once again Andre for doing all the organisation work.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Sprint Update

Just a small update before we head out for the KDE release party:
We discussed quite a lot of topics already, came to some conclusions and committed over 130 commits since thursday night. Yay!
We also are working on the next release which will hopefully be ready in about two weeks.
Tomorrow is already the last day, but it is really nice and productive over here so even a short time is worth it...

Thursday, August 2, 2012

KDE Release Party Osnabrück and KDE Windows Sprint

Today I arrived in Osnabrück for the 3rd KDE on Windows Developer Sprint. It is hosted in the office of Intevation.
We have quite some things to do:
  • What do we want/can we do for KDE frameworks?
  • What changes in Qt 5 (in all respects there are)
  • Which improvements are needed for our emerge buildsystem
  • What improvements are needed for packagers for single app installers?!
  • a new buildserver is waiting at intevation too.
  • improvements for our own kdewin-installer

Some other nice ideas are floating around as well, we will keep you informed!

For all people near Osnabrück: we plan to do a KDE release party and we want to invite all KDE developers and all Qt developers around to have a nice chat and some drinks in the unikeller.