The E-Banners for #Akademy2024 are now available!
Use them to promote Akademy on your websites, blogs, social media headers, or any other platform.
There are three different sizes to choose from. If you decide to use the banners, it would be great if you could link them to the Akademy website to help attract more visitors.
Let's spread the word about Akademy and make it a success!
(These banners were created by Andy B.)
Or FOFAFOSS. Rolls right off your tongue.
Like in many families, there's always a bit of.. turmoil and drama in FOSS. Something breaks (either on purpose or by accident), people get frustrated.. The usual. It is kind of to be expected when it comes to very social projects, like let's say, Linux desktop environments.
People have their own visions and ways to see things. They often clash. That's normal. It's quite human. I do like to think that Linux desktop environments especially are like siblings that have rivalries.
But we got to remember that it's not "us vs them" here. We don't have the resources to fight each other. We need to work together even with our incompatible visions sometimes. Otherwise things will keep fracturing and get even worse.. And nobody gains from that. Well, except the proprietary platforms. :P
In the end we all want to make good software for everyone to use and enjoy. Let's help each other to do that as well as we can.
Nothing wrong with "Oh you made that? Well watch this!" type of friendly rivalry however, it keeps us doing what we do best. :)
I just wanted to write this down as somekind of reminder that we got to remember to work together if we want to succeed. Even when frustrated.
And no I am not any high and mighty person to really say this, I have had my own share of frustrations and quips. This post serves also as a reminder for myself.
So let's try to work together as well as we can.
KDE will mentor ten projects in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) this year. GSoC is a program in which contributors new to open-source spend between 175 and 350 hours working on an open source project.
ShellWen Chen will work on updating the SSHD library in the KDE Connect Android app which will improve the application's security and stability. Albert Vaca Cintora will mentor this project.
LabPlot is a Data Visualization and Analysis platform. This summer, Kuntal Bar will work on adding 3D plotting support to cater to the evolving demands of scientific research. Israel Galadima will work on Python wrappers around the LabPlot C++ API. Alexander Semke will mentor both projects.
Arianna is KDE's Epub viewer, and Ajay will work on porting the Javascript frontend from epub.js to Foliate.js, the library that powers Foliate. Carl Schwan will mentor this project.
Manuel Alcaraz will work on adding support for Qt for Python to some of the KDE Frameworks, enabling the large Python ecosystem to use them. Carl Schwan will also mentor this project.
Pratham Gandhi will work on improving Okular's support for Javascript forms. This is particularly important because Javascript-powered forms are used frequently in PDFs provided by local governments, and while Okular already partially supports them, many functions are not implemented. Albert Astals Cid will mentor this project.
Soumyadeep Ghosh will work under Scarlett's direction and integrate the Snap ecosystem closer with KDE. This includes fixing the Discover integration with Snap and adding a Snap KCM to change the permission from Plasma System Settings.
Ken Lo will work under the supervision of Tiar and Emmet O'Neill on improving the pixel art workflow by adding the Pixel Perfect option to smooth out pixel art curves.
João Gouveia will implement the backend for a variant of the Mancala game as well as a solver under the supervision of Benson Muite and Harsh Kumar.
Chengkun Chen will work on improving the support for subtitles in Kdenlive. More specifically, he will add full support for the Sub Station Alpha v4.00+ format which contains style information for Kdenlive. Jean-Baptiste Mardelle will mentor this project.
Let's warmly welcome all the new contributors and wish them a good summer within KDE!
Screenshots taken from the GNOME bugtracker, copies to not stall their GitLab instance.
I think that is rather unpleasant and for e.g. the left icon-only border just an unusable insult.
There was no information that they want to break away from the icon naming ’the world’ does assume (given there is a spec). And now we have that state for our users there, at least on these spins.
That is not that nice, we did spend a lot of work to get our applications working cross-desktop and even cross-platform and now that…
I feel rather infuriated, finding this before going to sleep, even more after reading the feedback in the GNOME bugtracker and that this is just closed as ‘so be it’.
They added now at least a hint to the README:
Private UI icon set for GNOME core apps.
Ok, I assume that is then all fine.
No, it is not.
Then please don’t install it as FDO icon theme and break all FOSS apps that rely on the naming spec…
If you care for non ‘GNOME core apps’ to work per default properly on distributions like that, please either get them to fix it (hints are given in the linked issue) or get the distributions to install a compliant theme.
We can plan to work around this mess in the future on our side, but that will not un-break the application versions that are now already shipped to our users and non-KDE frameworks based stuff that will just run into the same issues.
You can provide feedback on the matching KDE Social, reddit or Hacker News post.
Last week, like many other people, I was in Berlin for the Mega^WGoals sprint. Natually the three goals (Sustainability, Accessibility, and Automatability; the three abilities) attracted a diverse crowd of people that brought also other topics, so it turned into a proper megasprint.
Being interested in all three goals made it a bit callenging to follow all relevant discussions unfortunately, but on the flip side it never got boring.
Most of my goal-related work was towards the automation goal. One thing I was working on is a CI job that checks for spelling mistakes in the code, so that those can be caught when doing a MR. A while ago I create a website that tracks which KDE projects are ported to Qt6. What started out as a joke for a talk turned out to be a useful tool for planning porting work. During the print I fixed the site to actually work correctly again and, most importantly, changed the text from “No” to “Yes” since most projects actually use Qt6 now. For a while the site also has auto-generated reports for other things, like showing which projects don’t yet have clang-format applied to them or which projects don’t enforce passing test in the CI. I used the latter list to enable this for the remaining projects that don’t have failing tests right now and prepared a change to the CI system that enforces passing tests by default. In the same spirit others and I also fixed some currently failing tests. We also discussed the idea of extending the site with more checks and turning it into a proper KDE site that isn’t hosted on my personal infrastructure.
Harald, Carl, and I worked on a dashboard to show the CI status for our project. This is something we haven’t really had since switching to Gitlab CI but is very useful e.g. as part of the release checklist. We do have a working prototype, but some things remain to be ironed out. As part of this we also fixed some of the currently failing builds.
My main contribution to the systainability goal was debugging why Nate’s NeoChat is using too much CPU. With a team effort we eventually pinpointed this to an invisible animation constantly repainting the window, which was then promptly fixed.
In terms of accessibility I was mainly involved in discussions about challenges and new developments with accessibility on Wayland. Expect to hear more on this soon.
In “off-topic” topics there were plently of discussions about visions, ideas, and challenges for our application development story. This included discussions on visions for design/UX, theming, API design, and software distribution. Being KDE’s Software Platform Engineer it is part of my responsibilities to facilitate these kinds of discussions. Later this year I want to host a sprint dedicated to application design to discuss and establish our vision there. If you are interested do reach out to me.
All in all it was a fun few days with great people. Thanks to MBition and Aleix for hosting us, and thanks to those donating to KDE to make these sprints possible.
Looking back at my blog, I find lots of mention of Amarok, the KDE audio player, in 2008, 2009, some KDE4-on-OpenSolaris stuff mentions it, and then a long silence until 2021. About a year ago, early 2023, the audio/amarok port was removed from FreeBSD ports. So naturally I was intrigued – maybe even excited – to see Amarok return from vacation with a 3.0 release. And I needed to try it on FreeBSD.
Many of the dependencies are (still) packaged on FreeBSD, so I installed a handful and tried building it on my still-KF5-based X11-based so last-gen Plasma Desktop workstation.
Somewhat to my surprise – I don’t imagine there is FreeBSD CI for Amarok –
everything built, ninja install did the right things, and it starts!
And toots and parples, clangs, bangs, blips and bloops are reproduced with
excellent fidelity.
So, congratulations Amarok folk. It might even return to the FreeBSD ports
collection, although – I’m gonna be honest here – I’m not sure it offers me
anything in the way of music appreciation that command-line gst-play
doesn’t give me. I am just that much more previous-last-gen.
I was looking at some code that sets file permissions – file modes –
by calling chmod(2). The command-line chmod(1) has a bunch of
possibilities for setting permissions, but the underlying system-call
needs an int, and the C headers for it are annoying to use.
So I fired up some C++ machinery to “make it nicer to use”.
tl;dr: scroll to the bottom for a compile-time, compact way of writing file permissions so that
chmod(filename, "rwx--x--x"_mode)does something plausible, with good error messages in case of typo’s.
The manpage for chmod(1)
is fairly extensive. There are two ways to specify a file mode,
either in octal or symbolically. Octal is just a number,
symbolically is much more complicated.
On the C API side,
the manpage for chmod(2)
shows you need a pathname and a mode, and there are a whole bunch
of symbolic constants to use, like S_IRUSR.
It turns out I nearly always think about file modes in octal.
I have somehow internalized things like “755 for executables”
and “666 for crap” and “600 for files in ~/.ssh” but I
don’t really have names for these things. If I think about
it, I can use the symbolic manipulations like ugo+rw for crap.
But I don’t see permissions in this symbolic form, and
the octal form is persnickety in C source, probably because
I don’t expect everyone to know “leading 0 means octal”.
But there is a form in which I see file modes every day:
the output from ls -l, where permissions are shown with
10 characters, the first 10 on this line:
cullmann
-rw-r--r-- 1 adridg users 0 Apr 30 11:46 example.txt
The first - says something about the type of file and is
- for regular files, d for directories, l for symbolic links,
and there are others, too. That’s not really the mode, though, while the next
9 characters are: each group of three shows r, w, and x
in that order, or a - in each position, indicating
the read, write, or execute bit for the corresponding class
of logins. The first three are the current user, next
three are group, the last three for others.
The C code to call chmod with this mode looks like
chmod("example.txt", 0644);
chmod("example.txt", S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR | S_IRGRP | S_IROTH);
One is octal-arcane and the other is just arcane and hard-to-read.
So I thought to myself: I can write a C++ function that
turns the 9-characters of the mode in text form, into
an actual mode_t value (that’s an integer).
That’s a trivial exercise, really, although it gets a bit persnickety in error handling. I would just throw on an incorrect length, or any incorrect character, and leave it at that.
From there, though, I went on to: I can write a consteval C++
function that does the computation at compile-time (guaranteed
to be only at compile-time, because consteval). This is a function
that can only be called with a compile-time string literal,
so the function signature is potentially:
consteval mode_t from_readable_mode(const char (&permission_string)[10])
The array-reference is to 10 characters because there are 9 mode characters,
and then a trailing NUL byte (zero) in a string literal.
This function can be called (in the context, sill, of chmod()) like so:
chmod("example.txt", from_readable_mode("rw-r--r--"));
and at compile-time that is already computed to be 420 (that’s 0644 octal).
The last step of make-it-cool (for an appropriate value of “cool”) is to turn the whole thing into a user-defined literal. In my source code I can now write
chmod("example.txt", "rw-r--r--"_mode);
Which really satisfies my own desire for “readable, compact, compile-time”.
For some reason, the values of QFileDevice::Permission are in hexadecimal,
but written as hex, look like the corresponding octal values.
So in Qt code if you don’t use the symbolic representation of the
flags, and just go ram an integer into there, you get
0x644 meaning the same as 0660 in the call to chmod()
and everything becomes just that much more confusing and fraught.
C++ and “helpful, friendly, easy-to-read error messages” go together like peaches and .. battery acid? Like things that don’t go well together at all. In recent GCC versions there has been a marked improvement in the look of error messages.
With some judicious use of templates and naming of types, existing error messages can be improved. You still get a veritable torrent of messages, but if, somewhere in the middle, the error message (here, from Clang 17) says:
mode.h:26:9: note: subexpression not valid in a constant expression
26 | throw invalid_permission_character{};
mode.h:41:9: note: in call to 'expected_character_at_position(&"rwxbadbug"[0])'
41 | detail::expected_character_at_position<3, 'r'>(s) |
Then it’s a lot easier to decide that the character at position 3 – the letter b –
is not expected, and maybe an r was expected there instead.
Here is the definition of my _mode literal. String-based
literals get a pointer and a size, which is inconvenient
because they don’t turn back into fixed-size arrays.
consteval mode_t operator""_mode(const char *s, size_t len)
{
if (len != 9)
{
throw detail::invalid_permission_string_length{};
}
return detail::from_readable_mode_string(s);
}
Anyway, if the string is the wrong size then
a meaningful exception is thrown, which isn’t constexpr,
so you get a meaningful error message:
mode.h:65:9: note: subexpression not valid in a constant expression
65 | throw detail::invalid_permission_string_length{};
main.cc:44:24: note: in call to 'operator""_mode(&"birb"[0], 4)'
44 | std::cout << "birb"_mode;
Here us the implementation of the function that does
the actual work, turning the string into a mode_t:
consteval mode_t from_readable_mode_string(const char * const s)
{
return
detail::expected_character_at_position<0, 'r'>(s) |
detail::expected_character_at_position<1, 'w'>(s) |
detail::expected_character_at_position<2, 'x'>(s) |
detail::expected_character_at_position<3, 'r'>(s) |
detail::expected_character_at_position<4, 'w'>(s) |
detail::expected_character_at_position<5, 'x'>(s) |
detail::expected_character_at_position<6, 'r'>(s) |
detail::expected_character_at_position<7, 'w'>(s) |
detail::expected_character_at_position<8, 'x'>(s);
}
It’s really wordy, which is unfortunate, but by writing it like this, the error message – at least with Clang 17 – repeats the template parameters and mentions the specific subexpression that is problematic.
Here is a Clang 17 error message when using an inappropriate permission character:
mode.h:26:9: note: subexpression not valid in a constant expression
26 | throw invalid_permission_character{};
mode.h:44:9: note: in call to 'expected_character_at_position(&"------uwu"[0])'
44 | detail::expected_character_at_position<6, 'r'>(s) |
mode.h:67:12: note: in call to 'from_readable_mode_string(&"------uwu"[0])'
67 | return detail::from_readable_mode_string(s);
Huh, I guess you can’t give uWu permission to others. The same error message from GCC 13 looks similar:
main.cc:44:18: in 'constexpr' expansion of 'operator""_mode(((const char*)"------uwu"), 9)'
mode.h:67:45: in 'constexpr' expansion of 'detail::from_readable_mode_string(s)'
mode.h:44:55: in 'constexpr' expansion of 'detail::expected_character_at_position<6, 'r'>(((const char*)s))'
mode.h:26:9: error: expression '<throw-expression>' is not a constant expression
26 | throw invalid_permission_character{};
And here’s the implementation that turns a single character into a bit in a file mode value:
template<int position, char accept>
consteval mode_t expected_character_at_position(const char * const permission_string)
{
const char c = permission_string[position];
if(c == accept) { return 1 << (8-position); }
if(c == '-') { return 0; }
throw invalid_permission_character{};
}
This is a bit wordy, but it ensures that
position and the acceptable (expected) char are front-and-center
in error messages, and that the expected character and -
are the only characters for which this is a constant
expression – everything else will fail because
exceptions aren’t constexpr.
So there you have it, a compact constexpr representation of file
modes with meaningful error messages.
You can find the code in my personal GitHub repository playground,
in the subdirectory mode/ . I won’t link it here because, frankly, it
is time I get my ass in gear and migrate to some other forge.
I'm happy to have been able to attend my first in-person KDE event, the Automation & Systematization Sprint in Berlin. Previously, my contributions to KDE have consisted of submitting and triaging bug reports. During this weekend, I was able to meet some of the KDE team in person, and become more involved. I've started working with the Bugzilla Bot code, and plan to start digging into the automated test code.
The Bugzilla product list had fallen out of date, so first I updated that (yay, my first accepted MR!). I also started working on using the GitLab API to automate these updates. In the near future, I'll be tackling some requested improvements to the Bugzilla Bot. This will lessen the amount of boring manual bug chores and free people up to do more valuable work.
Thanks to the KDE team for being so friendly and willing to help me learn the development environment. I'm happy to have found more ways to contribute that I enjoy, and will be valuable to the project.
The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.0 "Castaway"!
The new 3.0 is the first stable Qt5/KDE Frameworks 5 based version of Amarok, and first stable release since 2018, when the final Qt4 based version 2.9.0 was released.
The road to 3.0 has not been a short one. Much of the Qt5/KF5 porting was done in 2015 already, but finishing and polishing everything up has been a slow, sometimes ongoing and sometimes stalled process ever since. 3.0 Alpha was released in February 2021 and has been since used by many people, as have been nightly builds of git master available for various distributions. Now in the past few months, an effort was made to get everything ready for a proper 3.0 release.
Common usecases should work quite well, and in addition to fixing KF5 port related regressions reported in pre-releases, 3.0 features many bugfixes and implemented features for longstanding issues, the oldest such documented being from 2009. However, with more than 20 years of development history, it is likely that not every feature Amarok has been tested thoroughly in the new release, and specifically some Internet services that have changed their API in recent years are not available, at least for now. It might well be that getting them in better state wouldn't require huge effort, however, so if you know your way with Qt and KDE Frameworks and your favourite Internet music service does not work with Amarok 3.0, you are extremely welcome to join in and help!
In the following months, minor releases containing small fixes and additions, based on both newly reported and longer-standing bug reports and feature requests, are to be expected. Work on porting to Amarok to Qt6/KDE Frameworks 6 should start in the following months, the goal being to have a usable Qt6/KF6 based beta version in 2024 still.
One should observe that due to scripting framework port from QtScript to QJSEngine still being a work in progress, previous Amarok 2.x scripts are often not compatible. The script API documentation at community wiki is also partially out of date. Additionally, due to incompatibilities and other issues, KNewStuff downloading of scripts is disabled for the time being. Having script support in more polished shape is something to work on after an initial Qt6/KF6 version starts to be usable. It is also evident that the web site and community wiki pages largely originate from more than ten years ago, and contain partially outdated information. Some work on refreshing them and pruning the documentation to make it more maintainable is likely to happen during the following months.
The complete ChangeLog, which includes the pre-releases, is available in the git repository.
To provide some insight on the road from 2.9.0 to 3.0.0, statistics collected from git repository are presented:
l10n daemon script: 117 commits, +898, -192
Heiko Becker: 72 commits, +5641, -2112
Laurent Montel: 69 commits, +9478, -9697
Aroonav Mishra: 65 commits, +15474, -6808
Pino Toscano: 31 commits, +6892, -1637
Malte Veerman: 30 commits, +19466, -29990
Olivier CHURLAUD: 27 commits, +1106, -474
Yuri Chornoivan: 19 commits, +966, -806
Pedro de Carvalho Gomes: 8 commits, +145, -407
Pedro Gomes: 7 commits, +7222, -805
Luigi Toscano: 7 commits, +15, -14
Mark Kretschmann: 6 commits, +27, -17
Wolfgang Bauer: 5 commits, +31, -7
Tuomas Nurmi: 4 commits, +39, -23
Stefan Derkits: 4 commits, +20, -19
Andreas Sturmlechner: 3 commits, +189, -75
Aditya Dev Sharma: 3 commits, +47, -46
Stephan Wezel: 2 commits, +12, -7
Andreas Sturmlechner: 2 commits, +8, -6
Andreas Hartmetz: 2 commits, +2, -2
Victor Mataré: 1 commits, +7, -3
Tobias C. Berner: 1 commits, +5, -1
Thiago Sueto: 1 commits, +1, -1
Sven Eckelmann: 1 commits, +5, -3
Somsubhra Bairi: 1 commits, +1, -1
Simon Depiets: 1 commits, +2, -2
Rishabh Gupta: 1 commits, +1, -4
Nicolas Lécureuil: 1 commits, +4, -2
Nate Graham: 1 commits, +7, -7
Johnny Jazeix: 1 commits, +2, -2
Elbin Pallimalil: 1 commits, +11, -5
Christophe Giboudeaux: 1 commits, +1, -2
Antonio Rojas: 1 commits, +1, -0
Alexandr Akulich: 1 commits, +1, -1
Albert Astals Cid: 1 commits, +1, -0
l10n daemon script: 317 commits, +1597783, -75585
Tuomas Nurmi: 147 commits, +3813, -1550
Friedrich W. H. Kossebau: 9 commits, +1075, -1044
Jürgen Thomann: 8 commits, +130, -101
Heiko Becker: 8 commits, +187, -19
Pino Toscano: 6 commits, +3361, -24
Toni Asensi Esteve: 4 commits, +100, -13
Pedro de Carvalho Gomes: 4 commits, +51, -9
Mihkel Tõnnov: 4 commits, +4486, -800
Zixing Liu: 2 commits, +140, -8
Fabian Vogt: 2 commits, +9, -0
David Faure: 2 commits, +4047, -15
Damir Islamov: 2 commits, +401, -420
Yuri Chornoivan: 1 commits, +1, -1
Sebastian Engel: 1 commits, +21, -21
Nicolas Fella: 1 commits, +1, -1
Nicolás Alvarez: 1 commits, +7, -7
Nate Graham: 1 commits, +1, -0
Matthias Mailänder: 1 commits, +5, -0
Jonathan Esk-Riddell: 1 commits, +2, -6
Jakob Meng: 1 commits, +1, -1
Heiko Becker: 1 commits, +17, -17
Christophe Giboudeaux: 1 commits, +3, -4
Carl Schwan: 1 commits, +7, -2
Boris Pek: 1 commits, +1, -1
Andreas Sturmlechner: 1 commits, +2, -0
You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key.
The goal of KDE neon is to build all KDE’s software on a stable Ubuntu LTS base, we do it in an automated way and for the User edition have automated QA to deploy rapidly but safely. For the KDE 6 Megarelease there was a lot of updates and the system didn’t work as well as it ought, not all the update issues could be tested and this broke some the operating system on some people’s computer which is a horrible experience that should not happen.
We were testing KF6, Plasma 6 and KDE Gear 24.04 in our unstable and testing repos for some time before the release. A week ahead of release we were building it in our User repo and testing upgrades. Jonathan, as release manager for both the MegaRelease and neon, travelled to Malaga to do an in person joint release with Paul from promo, this helped the coordinated release but lost some testing time. Some package transitions happened during the pre-release week which made the updates more complex than they had to be and meant extra work (for better end result in theory). Once the MegaRelease sources were published on Thursday the testing of Neon was ongoing and many later fixes were made to make for a successful upgrade on the tests. Neon’s KF6/Plasma6/KDE Gear 24.02 packages were published later on Thursday and Jonathan drove home, alas due to bad weather there was no internet available on the ferry limiting later fixes.
Although the semi automated upgrade tests passed this didn’t cover all cases and some people had incomplete upgrades due to packaging transitions being incomplete. This was fixed over the next day or two and also an update to the installer Calamares was brought in which turned out to have a bug with the final install setup so although upgrades now worked the ISO installs were broken. Quite horrible.
On the Monday Jonathan fixed some more upgrade issues and Calamares so the neon end of things was fixed but there remain other problems with KF6 and Plasma 6 which affect all distros and many of these have since been fixed and some are ongoing, many caused by the switch to Wayland or Akonadi switching to sqlite.
There wasn’t one big problem that caught everyone. There was lots of small but significant problems which caught many people.
NVidia users had a number of issues often caused by the switch to Wayland. Most users can switch back to X11 to get it working but that is hardly a user friendly setup.
This is just a small sample, there were more similar issues.
Neon is a small team, Jonathan working on it (alongside release duties for Plasma and Frameworks) from Blue Systems and top volunteer helper Carlos with occasionally Harald and others helping out.
We had a review with KDE’s QA star Nate of what happened and why and mitigations and we also had two open calls with neon community members where they gave their feedback.
The Plasma 6 and KF6 upgrades in neon were too fragile and caused too much pain for many of our users.
There wasn’t one single problem and many people had a perfectly good experience doing the upgrade but too many people were caught with problems which will be painful when you are just wanting to have a useful Linux system.
Our constantly rolling release model and small team means we can’t guarantee total stability so we will stop using terms like “rock solid base” on our website and emphasise the new-ness factor.
When doing big updates test and if travelling bring in other people to do testing and fixes.
We can’t support NVidia hardware as we don’t have the skills, time, hardware or access to source to fix it.
Switching to Wayland was a choice of Plasma and after a decade in development a necessary choice but we should be aware of issues there and communicate those.
Get more QA on ISO images, currently we don’t have any prior to release which is going to lead to problems.
Consider if we can to upgrade QA on older snapshots as well as the current one.
Consider how to do more QA on KDE PIM apps.
Thanks to all our lovely users for staying with us, sorry to those who we let down and those who have left us. Thanks to our community for staying supporting of each other and us as developers. Of course there’s plenty of alternatives if you want a slower release cycle (Kubuntu have just made a new LTS with Plasma 5) but if you want the freshest software from KDE then neon continues to be a great place to get it.
