We Won’t Leave You Behind…

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

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

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. 😉


main view


log dialog


annotate dialog