K', Hot off the presses, here's some New Stuff for you, with the Quickness! ...terribly sorry about that, i shall endeavour to do better. Let's try that again.

As of KDE Frameworks 5.63, released on 2019/10/12, we officially introduce the fruits of my labour over the last few months, the shiny, new Qt Quick components, which were created to bring the Qt Quick submodule of KNewStuff up to par with the old QWidget based UX. Not only that, they also bring with them some shiny, new abilities in KNewStuff, which previously did not have any concept of comments outside of the very basic information of how many a content item had (which, incidentally, was also incorrect, and had been since, well... since that code was written about a decade ago - guess nobody noticed, because the information is a bit useless on its own).

Before running off and explaining what's what, have a video of my presentation from Akademy 2019, where i gave an overview of the new components and functionality:

You know this. It's the KNS::Button button, but now more Quick [API]. Don't use this unless you're doing some porting, keep going...

The dialog we all know and love, but with a twisty twist and shiny new tile types [API] Don't use this either (with a similar caveat), use the next thing instead!

The new Page. The new intended central access. Shown here in the similarly new test tool. [API]

The entry details dialog, except as a Kirigami Page [API]

A lot of entries have multiple options for stuff to get - the DownloadItems Sheet shows those. [API]

You want comments? We got comments! All automatic, except if you feel like doing something much deeper. Have a model. [API]

Authors are important. So we should trust what they tell us they're called, and what they look like, right? Anyway, a super easy data provider Component for Author information. [API]

When you have a UI-less library that needs to get some feedback from the user, what do you do? Well, KNewStuff uses a QuestionAsker system. [API]

If you (like Peruse) was already using the old Qt Quick components List and Item, they still work just fine. In fact, finer than they did before by a fair chunk. Do consider using the Page, though. [API]

As mentioned, I’ve started using Godot to create some games with my kids. We decided to start with something simple, so we created Super Memory. I’m still waiting for a graphics delivery, so right now the you play with “dad’s placeholder cards”. They aren’t pretty – but they get the job done.

I had three major goals when creating this game:

1. Teaching the kids basic programming logic – how to think like a machine.
2. Teaching myself a bit about Godot.
3. Creating a game that I can push all the way to Google Play.

The first two items are done – for the third I’m still waiting for the graphics delivery. Kids are such lazy team members ;-)

When it comes to the game logic, I decided to push it all into the entry point of the game: the table scene. The main parts are in the init_game function and the _on_card_flipped function. I would consider the rest of the code support functions, or GUI driving functions.

This brings me to the GUI parts. I’m still not convinced that I understand how to properly layout stuff using Godot, but at least it looks ok now – at the cost of some fixed element sizes and such. I need to spend some more time to really understand how the anchoring and stretching really works. I guess I have a hard time wrapping my head around it as the approach is different from what I’m used to from Qt.

Looking at the rest of the code, I’ve tried to make all the other scenes (in Godot, everything is a scene) like independent elements. For instance, the card scene has a face, and an is_flipped state. It can also signal when it is being flipped and clicked. Notice that the click results in a signal that goes to the table scene, which decides if the card needs to be flipped or not.

The same goes for the GUI parts. They simple signal what was clicked and the table scene reacts. There are some variables too, e.g. the number of pairs setting in the main menu, and the points in the views where that is visible.

All in all, the code is quite messy. I’m getting used to GDScript, so parts of the code has static typing information, while others don’t. Also, naming and underscore prefixing is a bit random. I’m also a bit unsure about the onready var pattern to hold references to various scene elements vs hard coding the reference. And one more thing – some parts are in Swedish before it all shifted to English.

At the moment, I have built installers for all desktop platforms and tried them. I’ve also setup an Android toolchain and pushed development builds to a couple of phones. This also works beautifully. Next step is to get the graphics delivery and push something to Google Play. I will keep you posted.

In the last few years I have come across the CLA topic several times. It is and will be a popular topic in automotive the coming years, like in any industry that moves from being an Open Source Producer towards becoming an Open Source Contributor.

In my experience, many organizations take the CLA as a given by looking at the google, microsoft or intels of the world and replicate their model. But more and more organizations are learning about alternatives, even if they do not adopt them.

What I find interesting about discussing the alternatives is that it brings to the discussion the contributor perspective and not just the company one. This enrichs the debate and, in some cases, leads to a more balanced framework between any organization behind a project and the contriibutor base, which benefits both.

Throughout these years I have read a lot about it but I have never written anything. It is one of those topics I do not feel comfortable enough to write about in public probably because I know lots of people more qualified than I am to do so. What I can do is to provide some articles and links that I like or that have been recommended to me in the past.

Articles

• “Why you probably shouldn’t add a CLA to your open source project“, written by Ben Alter back in 2018 is a must read. Ben is a United States-based lawyer who works for GitHub as their “evangelist” to government agencies.
  • “CLAs are Not a Sham” by Kyle E. Mitchell, a lawyer, is a respond to the previous article.
• “The trouble with Harmony: Part 1 and Part 2″ by Richard Fontana 2011, a Red Hat lawyer. He came back to the topic this year (2019) in his article “Why CLAs aren’t good for open source” summarising Red Hat’s position.
• “Why Your Project Doesn’t Need a Contributor Licensing Agreement” by by Bradley M. Kuhnon June 9, 2014. Bradley is a well known member of the Software Freedom Conservancy.
• “Contributor Agreements Considered Harmful” by Eric S. Raymond on July 8, 2019, represents a clear view from the individual contributors perspective on the CLA topic.
• “Community contributions and copyright assignment” By Jonathan Corbet, October 28, 2009. This article analyses from the contributor’s perspective the Canonical Ltd CLA which started a heated debate back then, leading to the Harmony project creation first and the initiative by the Mark Shuttleworth Foundation later on, two of the main attempts to standardise CLAs up to date.
• “Some thoughts on Copyright Assignment” by Michael Meeks, 2011, is still one of the most relevant articles on the topic, covering not just the theory but also putting examples of how harmful unbalanced relations with an entity that controls an Open Source project might be for contributors. Specially relevant has been over time the Recommendations section of this article.

DCO

It is impossible nowadays to talk about CLAs without talking about DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin). Here are some articles that I find interesting:

1. Ben’s Cotton article “CLA vs DCO What’s the difference“, from 2018 is a good article to read because it does not favour one over the other one.
2. I like the article “CLAs and using DCO clearly” from Hen written back in 2018 because it summarises well the costs associated to CLAs and how they (do not apply) apply to the DCO.
3. It is worth reading the summary of James talk at Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2014, “The most powerful contributor agreement” done by Jonathan Corbet.
4. Julien Ponge wrote “Developer Certificate of Origin versus Contributor License Agreements” back in 2016.

For companies that “do not buy into the anti-CLA” case, R. Fontana propose another two options:

1. Eclipse Contributor Agreement
2. The Software Freedom Conservancy’s Selenium CLA, which are not proper CLAs but DCOs in his view.

FLA

It is always interesting to learn about the Fiduciary License Agreement FLA, developed by the FSFE:

1. Fiduciary Programme
2. FLA FAQ
3. FLA-2.0 announcement.

Inbound = outbound

A serious conversation about CLA requires to understand the concept of inbound=outbound:

GitHub explains inbound=outbound as:

• “outbound licensing”, refers to granting a licence to another party to use, copy, distribute…. (depending on the license) your intellectual property.
• ”inbound licensing” means obtaining a licence from another party, to use, copy, distribute…. (depending on the license) its IP for your own consumption (distribution, etc. again depending on the license).

GitHub explains inbound=outbound as:

“Whenever you make a contribution to a repository containing notice of a license, you license your contribution under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license your contribution under those terms.[…]“

In the CLA discussion context, the general idea behind inbound=outbound is that the project should make evident to every contributor the contribution conditions, including those related with licenses rights and restriction. The contributor will then contributes her code with the same license, giving little room for later claims, either by the project, the contributor or third parties, based on those conditions being unclear or not easily reachable.

The project license and its description should be prominent and located at least where it is common practice in Open Source to find them. The same applies to all the assumptions and conditions affecting the contributors and the project in this area.

Common practice, many will claim, but sadly some projects are better than others on this.

Who is doing what?

In CLA discussions, it helps to know what others are doing. Here you have some links I have collected over the years and I still find relevant. I have to recognise that in a couple of cases cases I do not remember exactly why they called my attention at the time.

Company driven projects:

• Chef: Introducing DCO
• GitLab: Moving from CLA to DCO
• Docker: Introducing the Docker DC
• Nextcloud: Why I forked my own project and my own company.

Consortium driven projects:

• CNCF:
  • “Now DCO is preferred except for Kubernetes and gRPC.”
  • “Helm, for instance, also moved to DCO.”
• Hyperledger
  • Contribution policy
  • DCO v1.1
• Openstack: “General information about why a not CLA and why yes to a DCoOUS”
• Node.js: Announcement of removing the CLA
• Linux Container Project: LXD requires DCO

Community driven projects

• Eclipse: Eclipse Contribution agreement (a DCO de facto).
• KDE eV FLA.

Organizations with different agreements for individuals and entities:

• GENIVI uses a CLA only for entities and a DCO for individuals.
• OASIS uses a form for the same purpose.
• VMWare CLA FAQ
• Canonical: Individual CLA, Entity CLA and FAQ.
• IBM, for Swift, also uses a different CLA for individuals and for entities.
• Facebook

Organizations with CLA:

• Google
• Microsoft (.pdf)
• Check Wikipedia for more.

Additional links

And finally, I have several links that I think are worth reading for different reasons:

1. Project Harmony is worth investigating as an interesting attempt to standardize CLAs:

• Guide to the contributor agreement.
• How to use the contributor agreement.

2. GitHub uses an Individual and an entity CLA. It is interesting their CLA-assistant.

3. James Bottomley’s ideas about the Corporate Contribution Pledge published back in 2016 as complement to the DCO are worth reading.

Additional suggestions from readers

I hope my effort triggers the contributor in you so you provide additional links or challenge the ones above. I will substitute this text for those links you provide, obviously giving you credit by default. It would be a great way to help others in the future. Thank you very much in advance.

KBibTeX is a bibliography editor (BibTeX and somewhat BibLaTex) used in conjunction with LaTeX and friends. Based on this code base, a SailfishOS client called ‘BibSearch’ exists which allows to search for bibliographic data in various online sources (IEEE Xplore, Google Scholar, ACM Digital Library, …). BibSearch&aposs code makes use of KBibTeX&aposs C++ code, has its user interface implemented in SailfishOS&aposs Silica QML, and provides just two C++ files on its own to glue together everything.

It has long been my goal to provide a QML or Kirigami-based client of KBibTeX of similar functionality, either to be used as Plasma widget or for Plasma Mobile (thus equivalent to the SailfishOS implementation). Finally I have been able to put together an initial implementation using Kirigami2. There are several rough edges and bugs, and much of the intended functionality is missing, but at least one can search for bibliographic data. If you are familiar with Kirigami, it should be a low-hanging fruit to fix the obvious issues, especially given that there is already a Silica-based client as reference. Code contributions to branch feature/kirigami are welcome!

In a recent blog posting I presented some code on how to transliterate common Unicode characters into ASCII-only representations using a offline-generated lookup table to avoid dependencies on ICU which would normally do this job.

By an anonymous commenter, I got pointed to that Unicode (in Qt) is slightly more complicated than I had considered when writing the code: I missed to handle planes beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) and the ‘surrogates’ between code points 0xD800 and 0xDFFF. In a series of recently pushed Git commits I addressed problem of surrogates and fixed some more issues. Some preparatory work has been done to support more planes in the future, but as of now, only the BMP is supported. For details, please have a look at the five commits posted on 2019-10-12.

Lots of great backend work happened this week which is very important, but not terribly flashy. And most of the in-progress work I alluded to last week hasn’t landed yet. So I’m afraid the user-visible changes will have to be a bit light this week. But fear not! For Plasma 5.17 is undergoing its last rounds of final polish and bugfixing before the release next week, and work churns along on lots of great stuff slated for Plasma 5.18 and the next apps versions!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Font anti-aliasing settings are now read and written correctly, so you get slight RGB font hinting by default as intended (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.0)
• When Discover is loading application screenshots, the loading spinners are now located in the right place (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.0)
• Discover no longer lets you futilely try to cancel update operations that aren’t cancelable (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.0)
• Discover now shows apps’ licenses correctly (Aleix Pol Gonzales, Plasma 5.17.0)
• The system Tray icon for KeePassX and various other apps now appear correctly rather than being rendered as white squares, are no longer inappropriately scaled down in certain circumstances, and no longer crash Plasma in certain rare circumstances (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.17.1)
• When discover is being used for offline updates and an update operation fails, it now offers to repair the system (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Full Screen windows are no longer inappropriately movable or resizable on X11 or Wayland (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The System Settings Baloo file search page has been rewritten to have a shiny new QML-based user interface, which for now looks nearly identical to the old one, but provides a good base for fixing bugs and implementing new features (Tomaz Canabrava, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Kate’s editor color scheme chooser now works properly when used on a second High DPI display (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.64)
• Spectacle’s “Take a New Screenshot” button can once again be triggered with the Return or Enter key when focused (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.3)
• Dolphin no longer crashes when opened from the command line with a search schema (e.g. dolphin --new-window baloosearch://) (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.08.3)
• Dolphin’s Information Panel no longer includes hidden files in the file count unless hidden files are visible (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.12.0)
• When adding multiple albums to the playlist in Elisa no longer results in their songs being added in mixed-up order (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 19.12.0)
• K3B addons are once again listed in Discover (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, K3B 19.12.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Discover’s Installed apps list is now sorted by name (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Plasma Audio Volume applet and its System Settings page now have a more streamlines and less redundant display style, and look much more similar to one another (me: Nate Graham and Sefa Eyeoglu, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Konsole’s “Are you sure you want to close these tabs” dialog can now be made to never again appear (Kurt Hindenburg, Konsole 19.12.0)

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Akademy 2019 was hosted in the Milan, Italy. I had opportunity to attend the event and meet the other KDE developers, designers and users.

Talks

There were many interesting talks, including use of opensource in government, flying drones, virtual reality and several community related topics. Honestly it is impossible to list all the awesome talks I attended here, so go and check schedule for list of talks and slides. However I want to highlight the one talk which I gave,

Plasma on embedded devices

In Akademy 2018, I gave a talk about Plasma on mobile devices. Talk discussed why it is harder to run a Linux userland on the off-the-shelf mobile devices. This year I and Marco presented a slightly different topic, Plasma on embedded devices. Talk was about what solutions are offered by the KDE community for such embedded devices, and what efforts are being made.

Marco Martin also presented a new shell package, plasma-nano, which is a minimal shell you can extend to create a Plasma based user interfaces for embedded devices.

Birds of Feather sessions

Gitlab community & Workflow

Gitlab developers Alessio Caiazza, Jacopo Beschi and Ray Paik hosted a BoF session about the Gitlab workflow, and how to contribute to Gitlab. It was interesting BoF to attend. Seeing as KDE is working on adoption of the Gitlab for it’s code-hosting. It was quite useful session to attend.

Plasma Mobile

On Tuesday, We hosted a Plasma Mobile BoF, where we discussed topics ranging from general shell user-interface to the applications, topics which were discussed includes,

• File chooser implementation for Plasma Mobile: Currently it just shows the desktop based file dialog, which is not user friendly on mobile
• Start-up speed improvements for shell and applications
• Updating the information on Plasma Mobile website
• Documentation and developer experience, and how to improve it
• Various application specific issues
• Hosting a Plasma Mobile sprint in 2020
• Status of Packaging for Plasma Mobile in various distribution

Overall, it was quite productive BoF, even though we were constrained by the time!

Plasma on Devices

As a extension to our talk, Marco and I hosted a “Plasma on devices” BoF. Where we demostrated the Plasma Nano shell. Talked about the infrastructure we have currently in the Plasma, and also talked about how we can make this more interesting for hardware vendors.

KDE PIM

As Plasma Mobile is making various improvements, one of the requirement is the personal information management applications like Calender, Email, Contacts will be needed, I attended the KDE PIM BoF to discuss how best these two teams (Plasma Mobile and KDE PIM) can work together, you can find out more details abut this in Volker Krause blog. In general we discussed following topics,

• Moving of KCalendarCore and Kcontacts to KDE Frameworks
• Moving of the KDAV protocol library to KDE Frameworks
• Plugin Infrastructure in the KCalendarCore
• KAccounts integration in the KDEPIM

KDE India

Indian KDE-ers (is it even word? I made it up) met together to discuss the possible location and dates for next conf.kde.in, and how better we can improve the conf.kde.in organization procedure. There were several possible venues and dates were suggested by the attendees.

Sysadmin

Ben Cooksley hosted a KDE sysadmin BoF, where we discussed various topics related to our infrastructure, and scale of data/traffic we have to handle. We also agreed upon some internal todo items to work on in future.

Online Accounts Integration in KDE

As a follow-up to KDE PIM BoF, I and Daniel Vrátil hosted a Online Accounts integration BoF, where we discussed various topics,

• Current state of kaccounts infrastructure
• Possible API improvements for KAccounts
• Where we can make use of the KAccounts in KDE

Student Programs

We hosted a BoF session to talk about the KDE Student Programs, Google summer of Code, Season of KDE, and GCI. We also discussed the timeline and structure of Season of KDE program. Short note that I will be attending Google Summer of Code 2019 Mentor summit in Munich later this week.

Closing thoughts

Overall quite exciting event, I would like to thank KDE e.V. for sponsoring the accomodation and travel. It is quite awesome to meet community in-person and share ideas, and learn new things!

At Akademy Lars presented the plans for Qt 6 in his keynote. With Qt 6 planned for November 2020 we have to look at KDE Frameworks 6 within a two year horizon as well. We therefore need to get started with this as well, so we can help to shape Qt 6, and so we ensure a smooth as possible transition.

Planning Frameworks 6

I have previously briefly mentioned the discussions around this at Akademy here, and David has sent a more detailed report on this to the Frameworks mailing list. This topic deserves a few more details though, and things have evolved since Akademy.

The central hub for coordinating plans and work is the KF6 Workboard. The tasks we currently have there basically fall into three categories:

• Ideas/proposals: that is things that still need to be discussed and decided upon, sometimes requiring a more detailed analysis on the impact, or a transition plan. If you have topics you would like to see addressed in KF6, that’s the place to start a discussion. That’s especially a call to Frameworks users.
• Preparation tasks that can be done in KF5-based code already: This is mostly about removing the use of deprecated modules, classes or methods that are expected to go away with Qt 6 or KF6. If you want to get your hands dirty right now, that’s the best place to get started.
• Tasks that depend on Qt 6 or require executing actual ABI breaks: That’s the minority of tasks at this point, and those of course need to wait until that phase of the development starts (I’d guess around H2 2020).

To make progress on the first category there’s the idea to have a KF6 sprint in the not too distant future. We did that for a week in Randa for planning KF5, and that was tremendously helpful in order to come up with a detailed plan on what we wanted to achieve. So I’d not only encourage everyone contributing to Frameworks development to participate there, but also those of you heavily using Frameworks. Feedback from application or workspace developers is immensely valuable, and this is the place to influence the platform you build your software on top. Same goes for the people working on different form factors or underrepresented platforms. Subscribe to T11535 and indicate your interest to participate there.

Planning the Transition

Besides planning what we want to achieve in KF6 I think it’s equally important to plan how we transition there, especially since those transitions haven’t been always exactly smooth in previous occasions. Lars presented Qt’s approach (only minor source incompatibilities if your code builds cleanly without using deprecated methods in the last Qt 5 release), and that’s a good starting point for KF6 too I think.

However, the situation for KDE is different to Qt’s in some aspects. KDE is not primarily producing Frameworks, but products build on top of those (Plasma and hundreds applications), which allows us to define additional criteria for what we are allowed to change or remove.

The current proposal is to define a set of modules that block a breaking change, that is those modules need to be adjusted (or at least need to be trivial adjustable) before a breaking change is allowed. This is less about things like a renamed but otherwise unchanged method but about the less straightforward changes. I would like to avoid things like “KHTML was dropped, just port to QWebEngine”. Yes, both can render an HTML document somehow, but that’s where the similarities end, the API and the capabilities of the APIs are vastly different, and not all use-cases can be easily mapped, if at all. The burden to sort this out should not solely fall on the application maintainers, as that will result in many things staying behind on Qt5/KF5 for years to come.

Which components are part of this set is still under discussion in T11563. This should contain all actively developed and released products, but ideally nothing on life support and still full of remains from the 4 era. The starting point is Plasma, Applications, Krita and Extragear. So this is also a good reason to promote actively developed things out of Playground, and to retire things from the other categories that we don’t want to carry forward.

Ongoing Work

It’s not all planning and discussion though, actually quite some work has happened since Akademy already:

• Friedrich has been working on infrastructure to disable deprecated methods in KDE Frameworks at compile time in a similar way as Qt does support this, see his blog post for details as well as the corresponding task on how to help. This will ease long-term maintenance, and it will allow us to uncover remaining users of deprecated KF5 API.
• Andreas has ported Step, Kalzium and Parley away from KHTML, and Sune has started to do the same for KHelpCenter. We also got rid of quite a few uses of KHTML in Konqueror, only the about screen is remaining there now.
• Dan and Laurent have been porting KSieve, KSMTP and KIMAP away from KTcpSocket.
• David, Laurent and others have been porting away from deprecated Qt methods all over the place, aiming at being able to build things with Qt 5.14 with deprecated methods disabled.

Contribute

It’s a great time to get into KDE Frameworks development! In terms of development tasks there is something for everyone, ranging from simple porting jobs to redesigns of entire modules. It’s also a rare time window where we have more freedom to change things than usual, so it’s the best possible time to bring in your ideas and suggestions, via the KF6 workboard or by participating in the KF6 sprint, especially as a Frameworks user.

Thanks to the awesome Plasma Mobile community, we are happy to present a second weekly update from Plasma Mobile project.

Shell user interface

Marco Martin made several changes in the shell to improve the overall user experience.

The application grid was updated to show application names in single line and with a smaller font size.

Marco Martin is also working on re-designing the top panel and top drawer, and bugfixes related to that. Below is screenshots of current state:

Both the top and bottom panels were updated to use the normal color scheme instead of the inverted/dark color scheme.

Marco martin also added several fixes 1 and 2 in KWin/wayland for fullscreen windows used by the top drawer and the window switcher.

Kirigami

Nicolas Fella added new API to Kirigami that allows us to make menus in a more traditional style on the desktop.

    globalDrawer: Kirigami.GlobalDrawer {
        isMenu: true
        actions: [
        Kirigami.Action {
        icon.name: "document-import"
        text: i18n("Import contacts")
        onTriggered: {
        importFileDialog.open()
        }
        }
        ]
        }
        

Setting isMenu property to true on the Drawer, should hide the drawer handle when used on the desktop. Instead, a similar looking hamburger button should appear in the toolbar, which behaves appropriately for the desktop.

Applications

Simon Schmeißer added various improvements to the QR-Code scanner application, qrca. It now suppports decoding vcard QR-Codes which include trailing spaces, and features a Kirigami AboutPage. The sheet that appears once a code has been decoded now doesn’t flicker if the code is scanned a few times in a row. Jonah Brüchert ported the app’s pageStack to make use of the new Kirigami PagePool introduced in last weeks blog post, which fixes page stack navigation issues with the About page.

Jonah Brüchert implemented setting a photo for contacts in plasma-phonebook. Nicolas Fella improved the contacts list in the plasma-phonebook simplifying codebase. He also reworked the code for individual contact actions to make them functional and improve the scrolling experience.

Settings applications by default only shows the KCM modules which are suitable for mobile platform, Jonah Brüchert fixed the audio configuration KCM module to add the supported form factors key in desktop file, which makes Audio module visible in the Settings application again. If you are developing a system settings module with Plasma Mobile in mind, don’t forget to add X-KDE-FormFactors key in the metadata.desktop file, e.g.

X-KDE-FormFactors=handset,tablet,desktop
        

MauiKit file management component now can make use of all the KIO supported protocols, like kdeconnect, applications, recentdocuments, fonts, etc, to browse your file system. This will allow you to seemlessly copy files and folders between various protcols like webdav and sftp. MauiKit has gained a couple of new components, designed to be used as visual delegates for list and grid views, one of those is the new SwipeItemDelegate, which works both on wide and small screen form factors. This delegate can contain quick action buttons which depending on the available space get shown inline when hovering, or underneath, revealing by a swipe gesture.

Index, the file manager, has seen some feature improvements in the selection bar, when selected items are clicked you get a visual preview of the file and on long press the item is removed from the selection bar, making it easy to keep track of what you have selected. You can also mark files as Favorites and browse them easily in a new dedicated Quick section in the sidebar. The Miller column view now auto scrolls to the last column. By making use of the new MauiKit delegate controls, the file and directories on Index, can be dragged on top of each other to perfom actions like copy, move and link and also be dragged out of the app to be open or shared with an external application. Due to usage of KIO framework, Index can now browse various kio slaves like, applications, favorites, webdav, remote, recently used etc.\

vvave, the music player, now has an improved Albums and Artist grid view, and a has gained a lot of small paper cut fixes to be ready for a release soon. If you are interested in helping testing this early packages and report back issues you can join the telegram channel.

Downstream

Bhushan Shah worked on several changes in postmarketOS to make telephony on devices like Pinephone and Librem 5 possible with Plasma Mobile. The upstream change was suggested by Alexander Akulich to not hardcode a telepathy account name in the dialer source code.

We have successfully tested this change on Librem 5 developer kit.

Want to help?

Next time your name could be here! To find out the right task for you, from promotion to core system development, check out Find your way in Plasma Mobile. We are also always happy to welcome new contributors on our public channels. See you there!

KDE community has elected to finalize the transition to Wayland and embrace the future of desktop.

This entails making Plasma running smoothly under Wayland, but also making sure KDE Apps can run without bugs and missing features. It also means that we want to help the wider Wayland community to fill missing features and fix bugs.

I call App users and developers to try out their favorite app in Wayland and report the issue that may arise. and add wayland as keyword to the bug to keep track on those bugs.

And you don't need a wayland session to test an app, you can do it in wayland within a X session !

kwin_wayland # start an embed kwind_wayland

# In another terminal

gwenview --platform wayland # starts gwenview in the wayland session

We have a page listing how to fix a few pitfalls that applications may have in Wayland.

You can also test Plasma Wayland session of course and report the same way issues that may arise.

You can reach us at #kde-devel or #plasma in webchat.kde.org or freenode.

More information on the Wayland Goal page

I guess it is quite common to start the path towards programming by making games. I started with a simple guess the number on my dad’s zx81 back in the day. He must have written most of it, but I felt proud of the result, so I will claim that it was mine.

I’ve experimented with various ways to get my kids into programming. Everything from board games, online resources, scratch, building shitty robots, and so on. They get it, but it is hard to move on from the basics to being able to start from a clean sheet of paper and create something.

During the summer, I decided to look into the various options and tried using Unity and Godot. After a couple of experiments, I settled on using Godot. Partly because of its open nature, but also because as a tool, it does the job I need it to do just as well as Unity.

From my perspective, Godot is interesting, as it is a tool that is based around a visual editor. You do write code, but you add the code to the visual model, and not the other way around. This is somewhat backwards to me, as I come from a Qt background, but I’m positively surprised over how well it works.

Another positive surprise to me is that Godot also comes with export presets. These are pre-built run-time environments for common targets such as Windows, Linux/X11, Android, iOS, HTML5. Using these, it is trivial to cross compile and distribute your project – from any platform, to any platform. Very convenient. You can even build your own export presets.

When it comes to the not-so-good, Godot comes with its own language, GDScript. It does the job, and I quite enjoy working it it. You can use VisalScript as well, or C# with external tooling – you can also use GDNative to interface with the engine using your language of choice, but that is less straight forward. I do understand that there is some history that explains the choices, but to me it does feel like Python, without the huge library of Python libs.

Next up, I’ll blog about some of the games I’ve made, so prepare yourself for boardgames, classic game remakes as well as my humble experiments into VR.

So, finally it seems like, after crossing the deadline by a couple months, Magnetic Lasso is going to get merged, as Boud told me. Lets see how many more weeks it takes, so presumably it is complete feature wise but who knows from where a bug might pop up.

Background:

Many parts of Plasma are powered by QtQuick, an easy to use API to render shapes/text/buttons etc.
QtQuick contains a rendering engine powered by OpenGL making full use of the graphics card keeping our drawing super fast, super lightweight and in general amazing…when things work.

Handling Nvidia context loss events

When the proprietary nvidia driver comes out of suspend, or from a different terminal the pictures that it had stored get corrupted. This leads to returning to an image like this. Worst as we show stray video memory it even leak data on the lock screen.

When this occurs it might look something like this:

With various text or icons getting distorted seemingly at random.

Fortunately NVidia do have an API to emit a signal when this happens, allowing us to at least do something about it.

This handling to be done inside every single OpenGL powered application, which with the increasing popularity of QtQuick is a lot of places.

The new state

After over a year of gradual changes all of Plasma now handles this event and recovers gracefully. Some of these changes are in Qt5.13, but some more have only just landed in Qt 5.14 literally this evening.

Some notes for other devs

A QtQuick application

Due to some complications, handling this feature has to be opt-in. Triggering the notification leads to some behavioural changes. These behavioural changes if you’re not prepared for will freeze or crash your application.

To opt-in one must explicitly set the surfaceFormat used for the backing store to have:
QSurfaceFormat::setOption(QSurfaceFormat::ResetNotification)

Within KDE code this can be done automagically with the helper function
KQuickAddons::QtQuickSettings::init() early in your main method.
This sets up the default surface format as well as several other QtQuick configurable settings.

Everything else is now all handled within Qt, if we detect an event the scene graph is invalidated cleaned and recreated.

However, if you create custom QQuickItem’s using the QSG classes, you must be really really sure to handle resources correctly.

As a general rule all GL calls should be tied to the lifespan of QSGNodes and not of the QQuickItem itself. Otherwise items should connect to the window’s sceneGraphInvalidated signals.

Using QtOpenGL outside QtQuick

To detect a context loss, check for myQOpenGLContext->isValid() if a makeCurrent fails.

In the event of a context loss one must discard all known textures, shaders, programs, vertex buffers, everything known to GL and recreate the context.

One especially quirky aspect of this flag is that in the event of a context loss glGetError will not clear itself, but continue to report a context loss error. Code trying to reset all gl errors will get stuck in a loop. This was the biggest battle in the seemingly never-ending series of patches upstream and why it has to be opt-in.

In the case of a shared context a reset notification is sent to all contexts who should recreate independently.

You can read more about the underlying GL spec.

Note 1: This is not KDE or Free Software related, if you're not interested, stop reading, no one is forcing you to read
Note 2: Yes, this is still going to Planet KDE, KDE friends and colleagues ask me about it almost every time we met, so there's definitely interest
Note 3: You're more than welcome to comment, but remember this blog is my house, so don't complain when i don't tolerate stuff i wouldn't tolerate at my home

You may remember Catalonia held an Independence referendum 2 years ago, lots of things have happened since then, I'm going to try to summarize, if you're interested in my initial reaction read my blog from that very same day.

On October 27 2017, following the referendum results, the Parliament of Catalonia declared Independence by a majority of 70 out of 135 MPs. That was mostly ignored by every single country in the world. A few hours later the Spanish government used bigger-army-diplomacy (AKA article 155 of Spanish Constitution) to decide that the Parliament of Catalonia would be suspended and new elections would happen in Catalonia on December 21.

On November 2nd 2017, a judge put most of the Catalan government in jail with the charges of "you've been terribly bad".

They still remain in jail awaiting for trial results (trial finished a few months ago).

Notable exceptions of government officials not in jail are president Carles Puigdemont and Ministers Clara Ponsatí and Toni Comín, that exiled themselves to other European countries. Spain has tried several times to get European countries to extradite them to Spain because "they've been terribly bad", but that has failed every single time, so they ended up revoking the extradition requests.

Elections happened on December 21 2017, and to shocking surprise of no one, almost virtually the same results happened if you count the pro-independence vs anti-independence blocks.

Since then the Catalan pro-independence government has been basically very low-key in their actions.

Meanwhile, Spain had a its own elections in April this year. They did this nice thing of letting the jailed (but still not sentenced to anything, so innocent) Catalan politicians run, and several of them won Congress seats. Then they said "oh but you know, you're a very dangerous person, so we're not going to let you attend Congress sessions". Not that it matters now, since Spain is unable to govern itself and is having it's 4th election in 4 years this November.

We also had elections in the European Union, and you know what? The same happened! They let catalan-jailed politicians run but then they decided they would not let them take the seats. Actually, this time is even worse since Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín, that are living in Brussels without any extradition petition (i.e. they're basically free citizens of Europe), have also been rejected from taking their seats for some esoteric reason.

As a "fun fact", in late 2018 some Spanish regions had elections. Andalucia was one of them and the current government is a coalition of PP+C+VOX, i.e. right wing conservatives, right wing liberals and ultra right wing nut-jobs. One of their first decisions was to put away 100000 euros for grants to teach Spanish to Spanish born people (not for helping immigrants, they're right wing crazies after all) living in Catalonia that don't know how speak Spanish. I'm 99.99% sure the number of people that matches that description is very close to 0 people. You heard well, the poorest region of Spain decided to subsidize the 4th richest region for something that is virtually useless. Thanks!

Much less "fun fact", last week Monday, the Spanish police decided to detain 9 pro-independence people (later to be 7 since 2 were let go) with terrorism charges. The investigation is on-going and technically it should be secret, but we've seen pictures all over the news of what the cops say to be material to make bombs, and all i can see is a pressure cooking pot and some fireworks used typically for Ball de diables.

I don't want to 100% rule out this people having actual plans to do something nasty, but Spanish police/judges/state history of just fabricating charges against people they don't like is so long (An anarchist recently spent *18* months in jail awaiting trial for tweeting stuff "Goku lives, the fight continues" to be then just found innocent after trial) that i would not be surprised either if this is just Spain doing bigger-army-diplomacy again.

TL;DR: Everything is fucked up and I can't really see a way out at this point.

We published the Linux App Summit 2019 schedule last week.

We have a bunch of interesting talks (sadly we had to leave almost 40 almost as interesting talks out, we had lots of awesome submissions!) ranging from flatpak and snaps to how product management is good for Free Software projects with some thought provoking talks thrown in to make us think what's the future of our platform.

I am going and you should totally come too!

The attendance is free but please register at https://events.linuxappsummit.org/

Last month I attended KDE’s annual gathering Akademy, which took place at the University of Bicocca in Milan, Italy. Never before had I been to an Akademy where I was interested in so many workshops and discussions that I hardly wrote any actual code.

It’s important to stay healthy during a conference – a bunch of KDE developers taking a swim in Lake Como

I arrived quite late on Friday evening, just in time before the kitchen closed at the welcome event. As usual, Saturday and Sunday were packed with presentations: after Lydia welcomed us at the conference, Lars Knoll, CTO of The Qt Company, gave a presentation on their plans for Qt 6. We were glad to hear that Qt is moving towards using CMake as build system which is what KDE has been using for over a decade now. Another point that got us excited was that they’re aiming to provide a unified styling engine for Qt Widgets and Qt Quick. Currently, we try to fill that gap with our qqc2-desktop-style Framework which works pretty well but also has its shortcomings since it just uses QStyle for painting widgets to a texture and none of QtQuick’s hardware-accelerated capabilities.

My talk (slides, video recording) this year was a quick rundown of Plasma’s new notification system. I showed some of its features, such as do not disturb mode, explained new APIs for application developers to use, and gave an outlook on what’s planned in the future. One of the ideas on the crazy side was to have Plasma Browser Integration help reduce duplicate notifications synced through KDE Connect. Often I have a dedicated app on my phone but just use the web version on my computer. What if, when a notification is synced from my phone, KDE Connect can ask my browser whether I have the respective website open and then filter out the notification since you probably got one from the browser already anyway?

Organized like a pro

There were so many interesting BoF sessions this year that I had to actually schedule where to go well in advance. Starting off the week early in the morning was a planning session on KDE Frameworks 6, where we came up with a giant work board of things to do. See David’s email for all details. Later that day I attended sessions on Snapcraft (we’re “all about the apps”, after all), openQA, GitLab, and KDE neon.

Tuesday morning I scheduled a BoF on notifications. It was a brainstorming session on how to improve notifications both for application developers and end users. The main focus was how to make the history more useful, what ways there are for applications to manage their notifications properly anytime, no matter if it is currently shown in a popup or two pages down the history. Also, we did some planning for a KNotificationV2 class with fewer dependencies, first-class QML bindings, and proper platform backends for Android, Windows, macOS, etc. See the meeting notes for more information.

The Plasma BoF afterwards was mainly about Wayland (screen rotation, window thumbnails, virtual keyboard improvements, stability), theming, System Settings reorganization, and Plasma Mobile. Following the successful Plasma 5.12 LTS and based on distro feedback we decided that Plasma 5.18 will be another LTS release. Check out the meeting notes, too.

Traditionally Wednesday afternoon is when Akademy attendees venture out explore the area they all traveled to. This year’s day trip went to the North to Varenna near Lake Como, where we hiked up to Vezio Castle, and took the ferry to the other side of the lake. Of course, with sunny weather and beautiful landscape around, we just had to take a swim in the lake.

Gorgeous view from Castello di Vezio

On Thursday morning there was a session on how to write custom KItinerary extractors. I’m a huge fan of KDE Itinerary and in the few hours between discussions I actually had to write some code, I moved forward my secret master plan to augment Plasma Browser Integration with Itinerary and structured data extraction capabilities. Stay tuned for a follow-up blog post on that. :)

Carl already worked on automatically extracting all Plasmoid configuration keys for the new sysadmin documentation page

In the afternoon we scheduled a two hour track for everything enterprise. The big topic right now is KIO Fuse which will finally allow non-KDE applications to seamlessly access network shares and other remote locations. We were also glad to hear our friends in Munich are quite happy with Plasma 5.12 LTS. The second hour was mostly spent on touching up our sysadmin documentation and we decided to migrate it to a Sphinx page, similar to our new HIG page. The idea is to use as much auto-generated content from actual config files and source code as possible to keep it from getting outdated that easily. Again, there’s some notes with more details.

Thanks to everyone involved in making this event possible! It has been a great week of discussion and planning with many new faces that I’m looking forward to seeing again in the future.

TL;DR — go to Howto section to make WatchData PROXKey work with emSigner in GNU/Linux system.

Introduction

Hardware tokens with digital signature are used for filing various financial documents in Govt of India portals. The major tokens supported by eMudhra are WatchData ProxKey, ePass 2003, Aladdin, Safenet, TrustKey etc. Many of these hardware tokens come (in CDROM image mode) with drivers and utilities to manage the signatures, unfortunately only in Windows platform.

Failed attempts

Sometime in 2017, I tried to make these tokens work for signing GST returns under GNU/Linux, using the de-facto pcsc tool. I got a WatchData PROXKey, which doesn’t work out-of-the-box with pcsc. Digging further brings up this report and it seems the driver is a spinoff of upstream (LGPL licensed), but no source code made available, so there is no hope of using these hardware tokens with upstream tools. The only option is depending on vendor provided drivers, unfortunately. There are some instructions by a retailer to get this working under Ubuntu.

Once you download and install that driver (ProxKey_Redhat.rpm), it does a few things — installs a separate pcsc daemon named pcscd_wd, installs the driver CCID bundles and certain supporting binaries/libraries. (The drawback of such custom driver implementations is that different drivers clash with each other (as each one provides a different pcscd_wd binary and their installation scripts silently overwrite existing files!). To avoid any clashes with this pcscd_wd daemon, disable the standard pcscd daemon by systemctl stop pcscd.service.

Plug in the USB hardware token and to the dismay observe that it spews the following error messages in journalctl:

Oct 06 09:16:51 athena pcscd_wd[2408]: ifdhandler.c:134:IFDHCreateChannelByName() failed
Oct 06 09:16:51 athena pcscd_wd[2408]: readerfactory.c:1043:RFInitializeReader() Open Port 0x200001 Failed (usb:163c/0417:libhal:/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_163c_0417_serialnotneeded_if1)
Oct 06 09:16:51 athena pcscd_wd[2408]: readerfactory.c:335:RFAddReader() WD CCID UTL init failed.

This prompted me to try different drivers, mostly from the eMudhra repository — including eMudhra Watchdata, Trust Key and even ePass (there were no *New* drivers at this time) — none of them seemed to work. Many references were towards Ubuntu, so I tried various Ubuntu versions from 14.04 to 18.10, they didn’t yield different result either. At this point, I have put the endeavour in the back burner.

A renewed interest

Around 2019 September, KITE announced that they will start supporting government officials using digital signatures under GNU/Linux, as most of Kerala government offices now run on libre software. KITE have made the necessary drivers, signing tools and manuals available.

I tried this in a (recommended) Ubuntu 18.04 system, but the pcscd_wd errors persisted and NICDSign tool couldn’t recognize the PROXKey digital token. Although, their installation methods gave me a better idea of how these drivers are supposed to work with the signing middleware.

Couple of days ago, with better understanding of how these drivers work, I thought that these should also work in Fedora 30 system (which is my main OS), I set out for another attempt.

How to

1. Removed all the wdtokentool-proxkey, wdtokentool-trustkey, wdtokentool-eMudhra, ProxKey_Redhat and such drivers, if installed; to start from a clean slate.
2. Download WatchData ProxKey (Linux) *New* driver from eMudhra.
3. Unzip and install wdtokentool-ProxKey-1.1.1 RPM/DEB package. Note that this package installs the TRUSTKEY driver (usr/lib/WatchData/TRUSTKEY/lib/libwdpkcs_TRUSTKEY.so), not ProxKey driver (/usr/lib/WatchData/ProxKey/lib/libwdpkcs_SignatureP11.so) and it seems the ProxKey token only works with TRUSTKEY driver!
4. Start pcscd_wd.service by systemctl start pcscd_wd.service (only if not auto-started)
5. Plug in your PROXKey token. (journalctl -f would still show the error message, but — lesson learned — this error can be safely ignored!)
6. Download emsigner from GST website and unzip it into your ~/Documents or another directory (say ~/Documents/emSigner).
7. Ensure port 1585 is open in firewall settings: firewall-cmd --add-port=1585/tcp --zone=FedoraWorkstation (adjust the firewall zone if necessary). Repeat the same command by adding --permanent to make this change effective across reboot).
8. Go to ~/Documents/emSigner in shell and run ./startserver.sh (make sure to chmod 0755 startserver.sh, or double-click on this script from a file browser).
9. Login to GST portal and try to file your return with DSC.
10. f you get the error Failed to establish connection to the server. Kindly restart the Emsigner when trying to sign, open another tab in browser window and go to https://localhost:1585 and try signing again.
11. You should be prompted for the digital signature PIN and signing should succeed.

It is possible to use this digital token also in Firefox (via Preferences → Privacy & Security → Certificates → Security Devices → Load with Module filename as usr/lib/WatchData/TRUSTKEY/lib/libwdpkcs_TRUSTKEY.so) as long as the key is plugged in. Here again, you can skip the error message unable to load the module.

Akademy 2019 has been over for a little more than 3 weeks now. It’s been a great and eventful Akademy. Let’s take a look at what happened.

New goals

In 2017 we chose 3 goals to work towards together as a community. Those were improved onboarding, usability and productivity of basic software and privacy. For all of them we’ve made great progress and I’m thrilled by the result. But the original idea behind the goals wasn’t just to get work done on some specific goals. The other reason was to give us something to work towards together as a community (as we were starting to lose that uniting factor that binds us all together as KDE grows) and to get in new people by making it clearer what we need help with and where to dive in. Looking back now my expectations were exceeded quite a bit for those. It makes me so happy to see a lot of new people joining and being enthusiastic about contributing to KDE in meaningful ways – even going so far as to proposing 2 of the 3 selected initial goals.

At the beginning of the year we decided it was time to shift our focus to new goals and started the process for proposing and voting on new goals. We started Akademy with a review of the initial goals and then I had the pleasure to announce the new ones:

• Wayland: We will finalize the transition to Wayland and embrace the future of desktop. This is a necessary step towards a lot of new features and improvements our users want to see, like better touchscreen support.
• Consistency: As KDE’s software evolved small and large inconsistencies creep in that make our software less pleasant to use. It also means having to maintain different implementations of essentially the same component like a scrollbar. We will identify and remove these inconsistencies in all of KDE’s software.
• All about the Apps: We want to refocus on KDE’s applications and make them easier to discover and install for our users.

I’m looking forward to the progress on these goals over the next 2 to 3 years. To start helping out please have a look at the goals page and get in touch.

New board

As every year during Akademy we held the general assembly of KDE e.V. and elected new board members for the two open positions. I’m delighted to welcome Adriaan and Neofytos to the board.

After the election it was time to decide on the board positions. I have been on the board of KDE e.V. for 8 years now and the president for 5 years. Leading this organisation has been one of the most important things I have done so far and I believe I have made an impact. At the same time I am convinced that it is not healthy for an organisation to be lead by the same person for too long. That’s why at the start of my current term we discussed how we see the future of the organisation and our role in it. It was clear that Aleix has been doing invaluable work on the board as the vice president and would clearly be a good choice to lead the organisation in the future. We decided that we will have at least one year at the end of our current term where I will be on the board to support and advice and ensure a smooth transition for Aleix. This time has come now. I would like to ask you all welcome Aleix as the new president of KDE e.V. and provide him with all the support he needs. I am looking forward to working with our new Board and see where we will take KDE e.V. together in the next years.

The new board positions we agreed on are as follows:

• Aleix Pol i Gonzalez: President
• Lydia Pintscher: Vice President
• Eike Hein: Vice President and Treasurer
• Adriaan de Groot: Board Member
• Neofytos Kolokotronis: Board Member

Next Akademy

We are still looking for a host for Akademy 2020. If you’d like to host the KDE community next year please have a look at the call for hosts which has all the details and reach out if you have any questions.