Four Core continues series of KDE 4 meetings

This article was originally published on Newsforge on 2006-07-10 at https://trends.newsforge.com/trends/06/07/10/2047210.shtml, but is no longer available elsewhere online.

In another of several events designed to accelerate the development of the K Desktop Environment’s next major release, members of the KDE project attended the Four Core meeting last week (July first through the seventh). Attendees were committed to readying the fundamental kdelibs and kdebase packages for version four so that work on overlying applications may continue. Attendee Aaron Seigo comments, “I get the feeling more than ever that KDE 4 really takes off here.”

All the KDE 4 meetings, such as the recent Multimedia Meeting, are intended to build team coherence and direction as much as to write code. All attendees seemed to feel that the meeting was successful in removing the hurdles that so often face a development team working together from places scattered throughout every corner of the world.

Fair weather in Trysil, Norway throughout the week aided both spirits and efforts. Seigo writes, “One of the goals for KDE 4’s interface is to be more organic, which is to say to behave more like the real world which we are well adapted to. In keeping with that we went for a walk out to a meadow for one of our two group meetings today.” Work was done in a rustic Norwegian lodge selected to minimize distraction. To that end, attendees enjoyed beautiful scenery and catered food. Nonetheless, World Cup fever prevailed midweek.

On Wednesday, a reporter for the Hamar Arbeiderblad, a local newspaper, visited the hackers. The paper was apparently responding to an alert made by a local KDE user, who also visited the group. The resulting article, “Building the Future of Computing in Trysil”, can be viewed by paid users of the h-a website.

Hacking done at the meeting revolved around outfitting KDE’s low-level libraries for use in a new and modern desktop. Tasks involved in such a transition include implementing the cross-desktop standard communication tool DBUS to replace KDE 3’s DCOP, porting Qt calls to use the new version 4.2, and, of course, bugfixing. It was also decided to remove a few dozen obsolete classes from within the code of kdelibs. With the libraries more or less functional, the team must decide how to evolve them to suit the needs of KDE 4. Seigo writes, “We had a couple of quite long meetings today about kdelibs: what should go into kdelibs; how should we handle the process of managing the public APIs; what are our goals and practices for binary compatibility … not trivial topics even if the questions are easily stated.”

Though the meeting focused on the fundamentals, the team could not resist working on and discussing some higher-level code. KDE’s Human Interface Guidelines and accessability tools were topics of great discussion. KIO continues to be worked on, particularly its seeking feature first written during the KDE Four Multimedia meeting. A redesign of the KJob class should also benefit KIO, which uses it extensively, as well as emerging technologies such as Akonadi and Solid. Akonadi is a forthcoming Personal Information Management storage solution first proposed during January’s KDE PIM meeting.

Whenever discussing a new major version, replacing old technologies must be addressed. To aid the switch to DBUS, a graphical browser was planned which will work much the same way KDCOP does today, allowing users to easily see all the information and settings applications offer to each other. LiveUI looks to replace the GUI development tool XML GUI. A new composition manager is to be built into the KWin window manager to replace the independent kompmgr. As attendee Par Ervin commented, “We’ve still so much to do, but the improvements made in the last few days are really motivating.” On that thought, Simon Hausmann warns, “stay tuned for upcoming announcements of other things that happened here…”