christian loose's blog

We Won't Leave You Behind...

2009-03-22T15:42:00.003+01:00

Although the future belongs to newer application launchers like Kickoff, Lancelot or Raptor, some users prefer the old K Menu style. Nothing wrong with that. That's the reason why the plasma team made it really easy to switch the menu to a more KDE 3 like style. Unfortunately this "classic menu style" was quickly made and it missed a few features.

To improve the situation, I tackled the wishes #158302 and #187014.

#158302

The classic menu style now supports separators in the menu...

#187014

... and it also offers the same context menu as the Kickoff style.

Both features will be available with KDE 4.3. Have fun!

Re: kde and bug reports

2005-09-14T13:34:00.000+02:00

In his blog, Aaron wrote down some thoughts about how we might be able to improve our bug tracking system. As always a good read with some very valid points. But my opinion is, before we should think about any improvements, we (the maintainers) should improve our track record towards bug reports with patches.

I hoped that the "reports with patches" link on bugs.kde.org would improve the situation but it didn't. KDE has 445 open bug reports with an attached patch at the moment. Some of them as old as April 2003 and with no comment at all (examples: #57303, #83387, #58598). I know that not all patches are good or correct but IMHO this leaves a bad impression on our project.

We all know that patches are often the first step to become a KDE contributor and we tell people to attach their patches to a bug report so they don't get lost. But what's the sense for this when those reports are then ignored for months?

So lets show that we are thankful for the patches by letting the good ones into our subversion repository.

Status of subversion support in Cervisia

2005-08-18T19:10:00.000+02:00

I thought that some of you might be interested in the current status of the long-promised subversion support in Cervisia. Especially since the competition (kdesvn, eSvn, etc) is maturing fast.

With this post, I hope to show you that Cervisia is still a valuable developer tool with a bright future. :)

Where is the code?

You can find the code in KDE's subversion repository under branches/cervisia/subversion_support. It is still in a work branch because the cvs plugin isn't feature complete (compared to the KDE 3.5 version).

Will you make the KDE 3.5 feature freeze deadline?

Realistically speaking, no. As hinted above, the main problem is the cvs plugin. We will not be able to provide all features that the KDE 3.4 version of Cervisia offered to cvs users by August 25th. The KDE 3.5 release definitely comes to early for us.

Does it mean I have to wait for KDE 4?

I hope not. I'm thinking about a separate release of Cervisia with subversion support after KDE 3.5. But I can't promise it because I don't have any experiences with such releases.

What subversion commands are implemented?

The current version has support for add, remove, commit, status, annotate/blame and log. After we finished update and diff, the basic features for the daily work are available.

Do you use the subversion library?

At the moment we use a subversion DCOP service which starts the subversion command-line client. The output is later parsed by the svn plugin. We used this approach because of our experiences with cvs but there is also a discussion on Cervisia's mailing list about kio_svn.

There is a good chance that we will switch to this subversion kioslave in the near future.

How does it look like?

For current Cervisia users, it looks pretty boring. ;)

Quax der Bruchpilot...

2005-03-29T20:17:00.000+02:00

For my 30th birthday, my family gave me a gift coupon for a flight lesson (Schnupperflug) as birthday present. A few days ago, the weather was finally good enough to take the lesson.

I have never flown in such a small airplane (Cessna 152) before let alone being the pilot of it. I was a little nervous at the beginning, but the instructor was very nice and calm. So after a few minutes in flight, I was confident enough to relax a little.

When I got the present, I thought that I would take over the steering wheel after the start and just fly some curves, but the instructor just helped a little and the rest was up to me. So I actually also started and landed the airplane!

At first we were flying west towards Cuxhaven but the visibility was getting bad (below 5 km). So we turned around and did some touch-and-go landings at Uetersen (EDHE). The instructor was pretty impressed. He said it was the first time that one of his students did the third landing alone during his maiden flight. This proves that playing Microsoft Flightsimulator does help. ;-)

It was a lot of fun!

Making progress...

2005-03-14T22:48:00.000+01:00

Yes! This is Cervisia showing a Subversion working copy directory.

Feature #95257

2005-01-31T22:08:00.000+01:00

The last Cervisia feature that went into cvs before the feature freeze was the bugzilla wish #95257. With this new option in the settings dialog, you can highlight files in the file view with status "Not in CVS".

The default is the text color but you can now change it to something different.

KDE 3.4 and Cervisia

2005-01-06T21:48:00.000+01:00

The KDE 3.4 version of Cervisia will be a pretty boring release. I didn't spend much time working on Cervisia since "aKademy". The reasons were basically: lack of motivation, work and WWII Online.

But now the interest in Cervisia is coming back. A little late for KDE 3.4, but I'm sure that the next release will be more exciting again.

Power of KDE API

2004-04-29T01:00:00.000+02:00

Today Cervisia's changelog and commit dialogs both gained the capability to check the spelling while the user types in the log message.

Although this feature sounds like something that is hard to implement, the KDE API makes it very easy. The change to the changelog dialog was actually just a one-liner since it already used the KTextEdit class. So the addition of the following line was enough to activate the spellchecker:

    m_edit->setCheckSpellingEnabled(true);

That was easy. :-)

mini project...

2004-04-07T01:00:00.000+02:00

A few days ago I read Nat Friedman's blog and came across an entry about a "Desktop Search" functionality. This search function would aggregate search results from different sources like the addressbook, calendar, notes, etc.

I liked the idea and thought it would be pretty easy to do with libkabc and libkcal. I imagined it to be similar to KDesktop's minicli. So the project minipif (Mini Personal Information Finder) was born. The screenshots of the search dialog and the result dialog are from an very very early version. No code yet!

I know, I should be really working on Cervisia. Looking at bugs.kde.org, there are enough wishes for it, but I think it is good to do something different from time to time.

resolve dialog is in...

2004-04-02T01:00:00.000+02:00

I finally checked-in the new resolve dialog code. This should fix all known bugs like removed characters or added new lines. Another thing that should work now, is the case when a conflict marker and the content is on the same line. This never worked before. Yippee!

Unfortunately it was too late to backport it to the KDE 3.2.2 branch, because there wasn't enough time to test it. So it will be part of the KDE 3.2.3 release.

cervisia's resolve dialog

2004-03-27T01:00:00.000+01:00

I'm currently working on the resolve dialog in Cervisia. It has some bug reports (see bug #74903 and bug #46871) that are not easy to fix in a sane manner without changing the design. The main problem is the handling of the new line markers, especially at the end of the file.

The redesign will hopefully fix the above bugs and make the source code more readable. Unfortunately I'm not sure if this will be "back-portable" to the stable branch without some testing and the next minor release is near.