KDevelop 5.3 released

Elisa (product page, release announcements blog) is a music player designer for excellent integration into the KDE Plasma desktop (but of course it runs everywhere, including some non-Free platforms). I had used it a few times, but had not gotten around to packaging it. So today I threw together a FreeBSD port of Elisa, and you’ll be able to install it from official packages whenever the package cluster gets around to it.

I say “threw together” because it took me only a half hour (most of that was just building it a half-dozen times in different ways). The Elisa code itself is very straightforward and nice. It doesn’t even spit out a single warning with Clang 6 on FreeBSD. That’s an indicator (for me, anyway) of good code. So if you want more music on FreeBSD, it’s there! (And the multimedia controls work from the SDDM lock screen, too)

Getting started – clang-tidy AST Matchers

Over the last few weeks I published some blogs on the Visual C++ blog about Clang AST Matchers. The series can be found here:

• Extending clang-tidy
• Examining the clang AST with clang-query
• Rewriting code with clang-tidy

I am not aware of any similar series existing which covers creation of clang-tidy checks, and use of clang-query to inspect the Clang AST and assist in the construction of AST Matcher expressions. I hope the series is useful to anyone attempting to write clang-tidy checks. Several people have reported to me that they have previously tried and failed to create clang-tidy extensions, due to various issues, including lack of information tying it all together.

Other issues with clang-tidy include the fact that it relies on the “mental model” a compiler has of C++ source code, which might differ from the “mental model” of regular C++ developers. The compiler needs to have a very exact representation of the code, and needs to have a consistent design for the class hierarchy representing each standard-required feature. This leads to many classes and class hierarchies, and a difficulty in discovering what is relevant to a particular problem to be solved.

I noted several problems in those blog posts, namely:

• clang-query does not show AST dumps and diagnostics at the same time<
• Code completion does not work with clang-query on Windows
• AST Matchers which are appropriate to use in contexts are difficult to discover
• There is no tooling available to assist in discovery of source locations of AST nodes

Last week at code::dive in Wroclaw, I demonstrated tooling solutions to all of these problems. I look forward to video of that talk (and videos from the rest of the conference!) becoming available.

Meanwhile, I’ll publish some blog posts here showing the same new features in clang-query and clang-tidy.

clang-query in Compiler Explorer

Recent work by the Compiler Explorer maintainers adds the possibility to use source code tooling with the website. The compiler explorer contains new entries in a menu to enable a clang-tidy pane.

clang-tidy in Compiler Explorer

I demonstrated use of compiler explorer to use the clang-query tool at the code::dive conference, building upon the recent work by the compiler explorer developers. This feature will get upstream in time, but can be used with my own AWS instance for now. This is suitable for exploration of the effect that changing source code has on match results, and orthogonally, the effect that changing the AST Matcher has on the match results. It is also accessible via cqe.steveire.com.

It is important to remember that Compiler Explorer is running clang-query in script mode, so it can process multiple let and match calls for example. The new command set print-matcher true helps distinguish the output from the matcher which causes the output. The help command is also available with listing of the new features.

The issue of clang-query not printing both diagnostic information and AST information at the same time means that users of the tool need to alternate between writing

set output diag

and

set output dump

to access the different content. Recently, I committed a change to make it possible to enable both output and diag output from clang-query at the same time. New commands follow the same structure as the set output command:

enable output dump
disable output dump

The set output <feature> command remains as an “exclusive” setting to enable only one output feature and disable all others.

Dumping possible AST Matchers

This command design also enables the possibility of extending the features which clang-query can output. Up to now, developers of clang-tidy extensions had to inspect the AST corresponding to their source code using clang-query and then use that understanding of the AST to create an AST Matcher expression.

That mapping to and from the AST “mental model” is not necessary. New features I am in the process of upstreaming to clang-query enable the output of AST Matchers which may be used with existing bound AST nodes. The command

enable output matcher

causes clang-query to print out all matcher expressions which can be combined with the bound node. This cuts out the requirement to dump the AST in such cases.

Inspecting the AST is still useful as a technique to discover possible AST Matchers and how they correspond to source code. For example if the functionDecl() matcher is already known and understood, it can be dumped to see that function calls are represented by the CallExpr in the Clang AST. Using the callExpr() AST Matcher and dumping possible matchers to use with it leads to the discovery that callee(functionDecl()) can be used to determine particulars of the function being called. Such discoveries are not possible by only reading AST output of clang-query.

Dumping possible Source Locations

The other important discovery space in creation of clang-tidy extensions is that of Source Locations and Source Ranges. Developers creating extensions must currently rely on the documentation of the Clang AST to discover available source locations which might be relevant. Usually though, developers have the opposite problem. They have source code, and they want to know how to access a source location from the AST node which corresponds semantically to that line and column in the source.

It is important to make use a semantically relevant source location in order to make reliable tools which refactor at scale and without human intervention. For example, a cursory inspection of the locations available from a FunctionDecl AST node might lead to the belief that the return type is available at the getBeginLoc() of the node.

However, this is immediately challenged by the C++11 trailing return type feature, where the actual return type is located at the end. For a semanticallly correct location, you must currently use

getTypeSourceInfo()->getTypeLoc().getAs().getReturnLoc().getBeginLoc()

It should be possible to use getReturnTypeSourceRange(), but a bug in clang prevents that as it does not appreciate the trailing return types feature.

Once again, my new output feature of clang-query presents a solution to this discovery problem. The command

enable output srcloc

causes clang-query to output the source locations by accessor and caret corresponding to the source code for each of the bound nodes. By inspecting that output, developers of clang-tidy extensions can discover the correct expression (usually via the clang::TypeLoc heirarchy) corresponding to the source code location they are interested in refactoring.

Next Steps

I have made many more modifications to clang-query which I am in the process of upstreaming. My Compiler explorer instance is listed as the ‘clang-query-future’ tool, while the clang-query-trunk tool runs the current trunk version of clang-query. Both can be enabled for side-by-side comparison of the future clang-query with the exising one.

You have probably read a lot about Akademy 2018 recently, and how great it was.
For me it was a great experience too and this year I met a lot of KDE people, both old and new. This is always nice.
I arrived on Thursday so I had one day to set everything up and had a little bit of time to get to know the city.
On Friday evening I enjoyed the "Welcoming evening", but I was very surprised when Volker told me that I would be on stage the next day, talking about privacy.
He told me that someone should have informed me several days before. The scheduled speaker, Sebastian, couldn't make it to Akademy.

That was really a pity. If I had known earlier, I would have prepared a proper presentation, as I think I have a lot to say on the topic. I care a lot about good encryption support in KDE PIM and I have also been busy with Tails, a distribution strongly focused on privacy and anonymity.

So the next day I rambled a bit about encrypting mail headers (also known as Memory Hole), but it wasn't a great talk. It was also very stressful, as we started with a lot of delay: Setting up the audio took much longer than expected so all talks started late. As I was in such a hurry. I forgot a lot of what I wanted to say and failed to draft a greater picture for the privacy goal.

To compensate, let me say it here. Privacy starts with encrypting everything, starting with the content of the connection. This is mostly done via TLS. Here KDE is lacking some bits, as we cannot display the encryption methods, so we are sometimes forced to downgrade to old and insecure encryption methods without user visual feedback. But at least we support TLS everywhere! Unfortunately metadata is often enough to track where people are. To hide this information, we need TOR/VPN support within the applications. For most applications you can use the TOR network by running

torsocks <cmd>

but this is not really user-friendly.
It also has the disadvantage that you can't see if DNS requests are transmitted via the TOR tunnel. And then there's deamons, which you don't normally run from the command line. Furthermore, e.g. GnuPG has an option to enable TOR support and does not like to run using torsocks.

We need more control over the used TLS certificates and a way to display the TLS parameters, like accepted ciphers, protocol versions etc. Because at the moment KDE just asks you about unknown certificates, but you can't view/ control the other important details of a TLS connection to harden your system. Sure a default user can't decide whether something is good or not and a user may need to access some rotten company side. But we can provide a rating like ssllabs to show that the TLS connection is not good.

Another topic is to have a good support for TOR/VPN for applications and KDE in total in a user friendly way. And be sure that everything within these applications really uses the tunnel. I think at usecases like: I want TOR for everything except this application. After we have good solutions for those, we can focus on all the different applications. I haven't a good overview what each application should do in regards to the Privacy goal additionally.
As I'm busy within KDE PIM I see some things there:

• Encrypting headers of mails to give less metadata to surveillance T742.
• Make it possible to search in encrypted mails. Until now, the encrypted data are a binary blob to the search. The search is important to find mails again and is often a reason, why users do not use encrypted messages. T8447.
• Protect Akregator webviewer against ad trackers T7528.
• Add GnuPG TOFU (Trust On First Use) trust model support for KMail. With TOFU you will get more security without exchanging the gpg fingerprints. To make it clear, exchanging fingerprints gives more security than is achieved with TOFU, but it is exhausting. Only a small number of users exchange fingerprints. So many users will profit from having extra security by the TOFU security model being supported by KMail.

To move forward in reaching the privacy goal, I volunteered to organize a Sprint together with Louise Galathea. It will hopefully take place next Spring.

But back to the Akademy - two days of many talks which was pretty overwhelming, in a good way. I really enjoyed the mix of non technical talks and technical talks. My highlight was a talk about Kontact from Markus Feilner. It is interessting to see how users master issues around Kontact and what solutions they find. The talk would have benefited from Markus talking to KDE PIM before, as some of his suggestions weren't correct. But it was nice to see that there are happy users who love all bells and whistles from Kontact. The days after the talk I encountered another user who gave Kontact a try after years, because of that talk.

The BOF session started on Monday. I started the Mondey joining the Promo BoF to get some insights into how Promo works and how KDE PIM can have better promotion to attract new contributors. Together we created a rough plan to focus first on the new website and then create several blog posts to promote KDE PIM. Internaly we started to create several junior jobs and are discussing who can mentor new people when they come along. This is still ongoing and hopefully new people will join the new spirit of KDE PIM and aren't overwhelmed by the big amount of repositories.

After the AGM I joined the Distros BoF and was impressed by how many Distros have a KDE focus. We started to talk about issues regarding KDE and downstream. Especially if distros are time based, they need a lot of manpower to validate if bugs have already been fixed upstream, or if it is a downstream bug. The fast release cycle of different KDE bundels (Plasma, Frameworks & Applications) makes it even more difficult to follow. Maybe this BoF helps the distros to talk more about their issues in the distributions@kde.org mailinglist directly and solutions can be found for common issues.

The next day I attend KConfig BOF and talked about issues reagarding config migration and how to store config. Also a very common issue is that you need to get updates of config values in your application. KDE PIM has some examples of bad decisions reagarding config handeling, as you can configure a lot of stuff and everything is seperated into several files. But the seperation is not well formed from the beginning - an issue that's grown with the years. It is also written down as task to do cleanups and make the configs easier to consume. Because a clearer seperation also helps users who want to move their KDE PIM from one computer to another.

In the afternoon, the KDE PIM BoF took place, where we followed up on what has been going on since the last Akademy and what new things we want to do. We discussed a lot of how we can improve the onbording for KDE PIM.
As we want to make it easier for other applications to use PIM related data, we have a long standing goal to move single parts of KDE PIM to Frameworks. For the next KDE Application 18.12 we want to push syndication into Frameworks release. If we would have more manpower, we would move those things faster to Frameworks. If you are interested, or currently using some parts of KDE PIM within your application, it is a good idea to help us getting things cleaned up and moved to Frameworks. A bigger audience can consume PIM data more easily.

In the evening I joined the LGBT & Quuer Dinner and it was nice to cook together and chat.

The next days I mostly sat down and tried to get some smaller things fixed, like the issue with the suspend icon within the logout Applet. It is very good to sit next to Kai-Uwe so he could see and propose workarounds directly. Finally he found the hard coded color in the theme and the issue is solved in the next release.

Since there were many open discussions I did not managed to write a line of code within these days - I was busy talking. Additionally I wanted to see the newest KDE PIM within Debian, so this also took some time.

On Friday I took a train back to Germany. As Volker is always interested about live data from delays for improving KItinerary, he wished me some delays. And I had a lot of delay - I arrived in Berlin 12h later than expected. I had to sleep in Dresden, as the last train from Prag leaves at 18:07 towards Berlin. And since I missed that one, I had to take a local train to Dresden and there was no train anymore to Berlin. And it wasn't really late - just midnight. I never thought about that Dresden is that badly connected to rest of Germany...
But it was nice as I stayed at a friends place, who I wouldn't have met otherwise. From the improving KItinerary it was not a success, as I only got one update from Deutsche Bahn at 23:25 - telling me that the train from Leipzig to Berlin would use another track. The more useful information, that I never would reach that train would be more useful.

Week 44 in Usability & Productivity is coming right up! This week was a bit lighter in terms of the number of bullet points, but we got some really great new features, and there’s a lot of cool stuff in progress that I hope to be able to blog about next week! In the meantime, take a look at this week’s progress:

New Features

• Plasma now offers support for WireGuard VPN tunnels when the appropriate Network Manager plugin is installed (Bruce Anderson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The Alt+tab window switcher now supports screen readers for improved accessibility (Christian Hempfling and Frederik Gladhorn, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The Alt+tab window switcher now supports using the keyboard to switch between items (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• KRunner’s unit conversion runner can now convert between several units of measurement that are used in the petroleum industry, such as oil barrels and milli-darcies (João Oliveira, KDE Frameworks 5.53)

Bugfixes

• KDE Connect works again in KDE Neon (Erik Duisters, KDE Connect 1.3.4)
• The KWin window manager no longer crashes when KRunner is invoked while switching between virtual desktops (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.14.4)
• KWin window rules now work for Electron apps and other apps that change their window class during operation (Martin Flöser, kDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover now respects your locale preferences when displaying dates and times (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.4)
• Fixed a common crash with recently-rewritten System Settings pages (David Edmundson, KDE Framewotks 5.53)

UI Polish & Improvement

• Discover’s Settings page has been renamed “Sources” and now has actual pushbuttons instead of hamburger menus (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• Discover now has improved handling for local packages: it can tell you the dependencies and shows a “Launch” button after installation (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Improved the standalone search widget’s layout to match KRunner (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• We have brand new icons for the root folder and the root disk/volume, which are now used for in the Places panel for the root folder item, and to specially highlight the root volume/disk (me: Nate Graham and Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.53):
  
  New Root icons seen at the default size (16×16) and a larger size (32×32)
• Dolphin now warns you of the consequences before letting you rename something to begin with a period, which makes it invisible (Shubham Jangra, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
• Okular’s inline annotations now have improved the word wrap behavior (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Applications 18.12.0)

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can 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!

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

C++ comparison operators are usually fairly straightforward to implement. Writing them by hand can however be quite error prone if there are many member variables to consider. Missing a single one of them will still compile and mostly work fine, apart from some hard to debug corner cases, such as misbehaving or crashing algorithms and containers, or data loss. Can we do better?

Background

In KItinerary we have a number of classes representing schema.org types. Those are fairly straightforward value types with a number of properties, to be consumed both statically (by C++ code) and dynamically (by QML, Grantlee and JSON-LD de/serialization).

As implementing getters, setters, Q_PROPERTY statements, member variables, etc for about a hundred or so properties by hand would result in an unreasonable amount of boilerplate code, this is all done by a macro (example).

So far so good, but now we’d like to add comparison operators for those types. Specifically we needed operator== for optimizing away some memory allocations in case of non-changing write operations (similar to the common pattern of not emitting change signals in setter methods on non-changes). But the thoughts below are of course also applicable to any other comparison function, not just equality.

Implementation

Ideally we’d find an alternatives to writing the comparison functions by hand that would either be impossible to break or would at least not fail silently (e.g. by producing compiler errors).

QMetaProperty

One idea would be to implement the comparison functions entirely generically by leveraging the property iteration support in QMetaObject. That is we iterate over all properties with the STORED flag and compare their values. This gets the job done, but has two drawbacks:

• Comparison happens via QVariant, which means we have to register comparison operators for all types with the meta type system. That might actually be nice to have anyway, but it is limited to less-than and equal.
• All property values are passed through QVariant, which in some situations can have a relevant performance impact, in particular when using types that are too large for inline storage inside QVariant (causing allocations).

More preprocessor magic

Another idea could be to use more elaborate preprocessor constructs that allow for iteration over all properties. The Boost.Preprocessor library has the building blocks for this. From experience in an old pre-C++11 project attempting to catch SQL errors at compile time this works but doesn’t really lead to a nice syntax nor easily maintainable code.

A clever overloading trick from Verdigris

The solution I ended up using is inspired by Woboq’s Verdigris. The basic idea is that each property macro generates a part of the comparison function only, the comparison for its property and a call to the comparison function for the previous property. The chaining is done by overloading on a template type that essentially describes a numerical value by inheritance. A little constexpr helper functions allows us to determine the index of a property at compile time. Olivier describes this in more detail in his blog post about Verdigris implementation details.

The resulting code for KItinerary can be found here. It’s worth noting that while this might look inefficient due to the many function calls, this is all inline code in a single translation unit, so in an optimized build this ends up essentially as the hand-written comparison function would look like.

Language support?

Would it make sense to have C++ support something like bool operator==(const T&) const = default, that is let the compiler generate the implementation for us, as it can for a number of other member functions? Proposals for such a language extension exist.

There’s a bigger conceptual problem though, that one runs immediately into once the comparison operator is implemented: the semantics of comparing things. Here are a few examples:

• Floating point numbers: how close together is “equal” depends on what those numbers represent, in my case of geo coordinates anything within a few meters is certainly more than enough. And there is the little detail that NAN does not compare equal to itself, which isn’t what KItinerary needed either, as NAN is its indicator for “value not set”.
• QString: here the default equal comparison doesn’t distinguish between null and empty strings. That’s probably very often what you’d expect, unless you put special semantics on that distinction, such as in the NAN case above.
• Date/time values: two QDateTime instances compare equal if they refer to the same point in time, not if they represent exactly the same information (e.g. time specified with an UTC offset vs a full IANA timezone). For KItinerary timezones are a very crucial information, so the default semantic doesn’t cut it there.

An all-or-nothing approach for compiler-generated comparison operator implementations means it’s not a viable option in case one needs more control over the semantics. That of course does not mean it is useless, but it does mean the alternative implementation techniques remain valid either way.

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the 18.12 release to them

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 15 of November.

More interesting dates
November 29: KDE Applications 18.12 RC (18.11.90) Tagging and Release
December 6: KDE Applications 18.12 Tagging
December 13: KDE Applications 18.12 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/18.12_Release_Schedule

Slimbook and a pint of Cider

The weekend of 3 and 4 November Dave and I went to staff the KDE booth at Freenode#live, in Bristol. I had never been in that corner of England before, It turns out to have hills, and a river, and tides. Often an event brings me to a city, and then out, without seeing much of it. This time I traveled in early and left late the day after the event so I had some time to wander around, and it was quite worthwhile.

Turns out there is quite a lot of cider available, and the barman gave me an extensive education on the history of cider and a bit on apple cultivation when I asked about it. Sitting down with a Slimbook and a pint can be quite productive; I got some Calamares fixes done before the conference.

Our stand, before visitors arrived

We (as in the KDE community) have invested into getting booth materials ready for this kind of events, so we quickly had Konqui peeking at visitors and Plasma running on a range of devices (no Power9 this week, though). Dave had 3D-printed a KDE logo we stuck to the top of the monitor, and had a pile of leaflets and stickers (KDE, neon, Krita, GCompris, and some Wiki To Learn) to hand out.

Next to our stand was MineTest, with a demo and they sat hacking at the code of the game for most of the weekend. On the other side, Freenode themselves were handing our IRC.horse stickers and other goodies.

The hallway track

A conference booth isn’t just about giving away goodies, though, and we spent the weekend, 9-to-5, talking with people about the KDE community and its software products. Plasma could be seen — and played with — on the machines we had at hand, and we did some small application demo’s. As usual, people told us they used i3 — and our response as usual is that Free Software on the desktop is better than non-free software. Some people had last used KDE in 2010 or so, so we could show how the different parts now operate independently and more flexibly — and how Plasma is now pretty darn lightweight.

Here in the photo is Dave extolling the virtues of something. (I’ve edited the photo to make some people in the background un-recognizable by pasting Dave’s eyeball over their faces — I forgot to ask permission to post)

Conference track

.. and a conference isn’t just about the booths and vendor stands, either. It’s about the talks. Here’s one I sat in on about business models and how licensing affects the available models (in particular with reference to recent license changes in some projects). The KDE community is interesting because it’s not one-community-one-company like a lot that I see. We have a collection of small and medium companies building on, and building with, the KDE community’s software products. I think that’s healthy and generally happy. No licensing gotcha’s for us when using Qt under the LGPL version 2.1 and KDE’s Frameworks also under the LGPL.

Two talks I would like to single out are Leslie Hawthorn and VM Brasseur, (those are YouTube links). Neither are technical talks, but social talks, about what we (as Free Software contributors) do and why, and social issues we all face — and how to bring Software Freedom to more people.

A concept I didn’t know existed was platform shaming. See above: there’s lots of ways to use Free Software from the KDE community, in combination with i3, or on Windows, and on Free Software operating systems. Those are all OK.

Bugfixing Dave

I’d like to thank Dave for being a great booth- room- and dinner-mate, and Christel and the Freenode#live crew for a wonderful well-organized weekend. Not to mention the speakers and attendees who made it a happy and instructive time.

(Post in french, english version below)

Le mois dernier est sorti la seconde édition de mon livre “Dessin et peinture numérique avec Krita”. Je viens juste de recevoir quelques copies, le moment est donc parfait pour en parler rapidement sur mon blog.

J’avais écrit la première édition pour la version 2.9.11 de Krita, il y a bientôt trois ans. Beaucoup de choses ont changées depuis, j’ai donc mis à jour cette seconde édition pour la version 4.1.1, et ajouté quelques notes supplémentaires concernant de nouvelles fonctions.

Aussi, mon éditeur a de nouveau travaillé sur la mise à jour et l’amélioration de la traduction Française de Krita. Merci encore aux éditions D-Booker pour leur contribution

Vous pouvez commander ce livre directement sur le site de l’éditeur, au format papier ou numérique.

Last month was released the 2nd edition of my book “Dessin et peinture numérique avec Krita”. I just received a few copies, so now is time to write a little about it.

I wrote the first edition for Krita 2.9.11, almost three years ago. A lot of things have changed, so I updated this second edition for Krita version 4.1.1, and added a few notes about some new features.

Also, my publisher worked again on updating and improving the french translation of Krita. Thanks again to D-Booker edition for their contribution

You can order this book directly from the publisher website, printed or digital edition.

Jings no wonder people find computer programming scary when the most easily accessible lanugage, JavaScript, is also the most messy one.

Occationally people would mention to me that the categories on Planet KDE didn’t work and eventually I looked into it and it mostly worked but also sometimes maybe it didn’t.  Turns out we were checking for no cookies being set and if not we’d set some defaults for the categories.  But sometimes the CDN would set a cookie first and ours would not get set at all. This was hard to recreate as it didn’t happen when working locally of course.  And then our JavaScript had at least three different ways to run the initial-setup code but there’s no easy way to just read a cookie, madness I tell you.  Anyway it should be fixed now and set categories by default but only if it hasn’t set some before so you may still have to manually choose which you read.

In the Configure Feed menu at the top you can select to read blogs in different languages.  By default it shows only blogs in English, as well as Dot News, Project News and any User blogs who have asked to be added (only two are listed in our config).  You can also show blogs in Chinese (also only 2 listed), Italian (none listed), Polish (one), Portugese (two), Spanish (four but kdeblog by Jose is especially prolific) or French (none).  Work to be done includes working out how to make this apply to the RSS feed.

by

Some years ago I added an embedded Twitter feed to the side of Planet KDE.  This replaced the earlier feed manually curated feeds from identi.ca and twitter which people added but had since died out (in the case of identi.ca) and been blocked (in the case of Twitter).  That embedded Twitter feed used the #KDE tag and while there was the odd off topic or abusive post for the most part it was an interesting way to browse what the people of the internet were saying about us.  However Twitter shut that off a few months ago which you could well argue is what happens with closed proprietary services.

We do now have a Mastodon account but my limited knowledge and web searching on the subject doesn’t give a way to embed a hashtag feed and the critical mass doesn’t seem to be there yet, and maybe it never will due to the federated-with-permissions model just creating more silos.

So now I’ve added a manually curated Twitter feed back to Planet KDE with KDE people and projects.  This may not give us an insight into what the wider internet community is thinking but it might be an easy way to engage more about KDE people and projects as a community.  Or it might not, I haven’t decided yet and I’m happy to take feedback on whether it should stay.

In the mean time ping me to be added to the list or subscribe a bug on bugs.kde.org to request you or someone you know or or your project be added (or removed).  Also volunteers wanted to help curate the feed, ping me to help out.

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Chrys took up the role of coordinator, fixer and new master of KDE accessibility, which I think is just fantastic. We have been working on what he decided to be most important, mostly chrys fixing issues to make things work with Plasma and screen readers. After getting Orca to read desktop icons he spent quite some time to improve the various start menus.

With so much fresh energy around I started poking at KWin, which was a bit scary, to be honest. It was fun to read code I hadn’t looked at before. In the end, after I spent a while working on a huge work-around, it turned out that we could enable the task switcher to work with relatively little code added. The main issue was that KWin does really not want to give focus to the task switcher. My first attempt was to write sub-classes of QAccessibleInterface for everything in KWin. That started to work, but during some debugging I realized that KWin was actually creating the regular representations for its UI, it was just not properly announcing them to Orca. Thus I threw away my almost complete prototype. At least I verified that it’s possible to create an entire Qt UI for screen readers only, disconnected from the actual UI. Thanks to QAccessible::installFactory it is nowadays pretty easy to instantiate custom representations (subclasses of QAccessibleInterface). Once that was done, I started over and made the task switcher think it’s an active window without letting X11 or Wayland know. That way we get the right dbus messages sent to Orca, when alt-tabbing through the windows. Thanks David, Martin, Roman and Vlad for your input

More work is needed on Plasma when it comes to keyboard usability – getting the focus onto the panel and the various notification areas. I’m sure some great ideas are already being worked on, but I can see this easily as a blocker going forward. Configuring the network, checking the battery status and other tasks are really important after all.

I wrote the basics for Kate to work with screen readers in 2014 and it seems like there are some improvements needed when working with Orca, luckily we got some help from Joanie (who maintains Orca) to figure out what goes wrong when navigating by lines. Now it’s just to verify the findings and get the issues sorted out.

If you have a bit of time and want to help, we need someone with good English skills to help clean up the wiki. Good written instructions are really helpful when getting blind users to try Plasma for the first time. We’d also be happy if more people joined in testing and improving things. Join the KDE Accessibility mailing list to join the fun.

slide in/out animation

• Current mode, in order to automatically update button appearance according to plasma current window decoration
• Choose the decoration theme you would like to use for the buttons
• Support Minimize/Maximize/Close/OnAllDesktops buttons
• Support icon-based Aurorae themes such as .svg and .svgz
• Identify system's available decorations automatically
• Option to show buttons only when there is an active-maximized window in the current screen
• Slide out/in animation for showing/hiding buttons
• Reorder buttons according to user preference
• Various appearance settings in order to adjust margins. This way you can also change the button size
• Automatically discover Aurorae theme settings in order to make buttons look identical to window buttons
• Support new Latte coloring mechanism from Latte git version
• a beautiful and easy to use settings window

settings window

Today we released version 1.10 of the KDE Connect Android app. Therefore it’s time again to share what we’ve been working on.

Targeting Android Oreo

As of this month app updates uploaded to Google Play need to target Android 8. This has several implications. Targeting Oreo comes with an updated Support Library, which forces us to drop support for Android 4.0 and below. According to our Google Play data this will affect approximately 400 users. We are very sorry about that, but these users won’t receive further updates. Furthermore, Android Oreo introduced some restrictions in regard to apps running in the background. In the future in order to be able to run in the background KDE Connect needs to show a persistent notification. The good news is that you can hide the notification. The (slightly) bad news is that we cannot do it by default. To hide the notification you need to long-press it and switch it off. Other notifications from KDE Connect are unaffected by this.

1.10 Changes

These are the main changes of version 1.10. Not mentioned are countless small improvements and under-the-hood changes.

Mouse input now works with the same speed independent from the phones pixel density.

The media controller now allows stopping playback.

Run command supports triggering commands using kdeconnect:// URLs. Useful for integration with NFC tags and 3rd-party apps.

The notification filter allows quickly (de-)selecting all apps.

Several settings scatterd across the UI have been bundled into a single settings screen.

A lot of work has gone into how we handle SMS on the Android side in preparation for something huge. Stay tuned

Other changes

The desktop side has improved as well since my last post.

The windows build of KDE Connect gained support for keyboard input.

The plasmoid gained a couple of additions. In my last update I mentioned that it is possible to run commands from there. It is now also possible to lauch the command setup from there. Furthermore it is now possible to select files to share them from there.

The Linux Mobile App gained many visual improvements and features. It now supports sharing files and controlling the system volume.

If you are using Itinerary you can send booking information from the PC directly to the phone via KDE Connect.

It is now possible to send files directly from Pantheon Files (and other Elementary apps) and Thunar via KDE Connect.

Again, there are countless other improvements that I did not explicitly mention.

A big thanks to all people who contributed to this!

The KMyMoney development team is proud to present version 5.0.2 of its open source Personal Finance Manager.

Although several members of the development team had been using version 5.0.1 in production for some time, a number of bugs and regressions slipped through testing, mainly in areas and features not used by them.

These have been reported by many of you and the development team worked hard to fix them in the meantime. The result of this effort is the new KMyMoney 5.0.2 release.

Despite even more extensive testing than usual, we understand that some bugs may have slipped past our best efforts. If you find one of them, please forgive us, and be sure to report it, either to the mailing list or on bugs.kde.org.

From here, we will continue to fix reported bugs, and working to add many requested additions and enhancements, as well as further improving performance.

Thanks

Many thanks go out to KDE’s sysadmin team. Ben in particular supported us with numerous hours to get daily builds onto the KDE CI system. This even includes MS-Windows installers. Please feel free to visit our overview page of the CI builds at https://kmymoney.org/build.php.

Thanks also to those users who provided valuable support by sending in test files saved by earlier versions as far back as KMyMoney 4.6.6. Using these files we were able to fix some upgrade problems.

The details

Here is the list of the bugs which have been fixed:

• 283784 when using the ‘amount entry widget’ in the ledger view, it hangs off the screen
• 340244 Update the documentation screenshots
• 340902 Saving anonymous file loses relation between investment accounts and brokerage accounts
• 343878 investment account does not have key value pair for lastImportedTransactionDate
• 344409 User is asked to create a new category in splits table if change is aborted
• 368190 “Update Stock and Currency Prices” doesn’t work when base currency is South Korean Won(KRW)
• 385180 investactivities.cpp: 8 * Redundant condition
• 390750 Entering fees in Investment account (ie broker fee) doesn’t appear with transaction
• 391251 Double free or corruption when creating a new asset account.
• 392110 Missing 2 .h files in /usr/include/kmymoney
• 392372 5.0.1 is shown as 5.0.0 in splash screen and about dialog
• 392407 Home page Net Worth Forecast Not correct
• 392477 Cannot create new investment
• 392519 Reports Configure dialog uses a “Find” button instead of an “Apply” button.
• 392603 OFX – Mapping Account – Last Update Change causing Update Account greying – Online Settings disappears
• 392735 Crash on viewing or trying to add data into any account
• 393168 [Patch] Fix working week in 5.x/master
• 393752 Budgeted vs. Actual report: Budgeted values broken if ticks selected to Bi-Monthly, Quarterly or Yearly
• 394384 MySQL connection error with dbname “KMyMoney”
• 394394 problems adding securities to investment accounts
• 395025 csv writer generates invalid file in case field delimiter is used in any field
• 395040 CSV Export of Investment Accounts does not issue transactions on non-English kmymoney installations
• 395100 Last selected view
• 395291 KMyMoney gitt head master, crash on opening any account
• 395459 Ledger Input: Category Field
• 395985 QIF Export manually typing file path adds .qif after every character
• 396174 Cannot create new investment
• 396405 Last digit of date field is obscured by “details column” in ledger view
• 396759 CSV: ordering of buttons when finishing wizard
• 396886 Online Banking Behavior Change Since 4.8
• 396987 Payee “Suggest a category” does not work
• 397020 Opening dates in “all dates” plot
• 397021 Net worth does not appear
• 397023 Default color of imported transaction in the ledger
• 397025 Kmymoney version in help menu, splash screen and apt are different
• 397436 Net worth forecast graph in new file shows formatting problem
• 397457 double clicking in ledger activates edit, but does not select transaction clicked on
• 397675 cannot connect to kmysql database because of prepended slash
• 97824 Limit in number of securities
• 398168 écran d’accueil
• 398394 Account information report crashes
• 398409 KMyMoney does not prompt for password when connecting to database
• 399244 KMyMoney does not work properly when changing from one file to another
• 399309 “show balance chart” does not show 3 months forecast in the future anymore
• 399378 Unable to Update Prices
• 399673 importer file selector does not show QIF files and does not remember last import directory

Here are some of the new improvements found in this release:

• 396797 Online web source “KMyMoney Currency” does not support price pairs without decimal
• Speedup loading of home page
• KDE binary factory builds for MS-Windows installer
• Add color coding of pos/neg amounts for ‘posted value’ column
• Fix online credit transfer creation
• Some features have been moved to plugins so that they can be turned off if unused
• Provide correct version information for all shared object files
• Improved handling of “Save as…” logic
• Allow to add a timezone offset for OFX import on account basis
• Moved GPG key handling to XML plugin
• Accounts can now take a URL for direct access of the online banking web-site
• Support more than one online banking provider during update
• Added option to keep linebreaks in memo of AqBanking transaction imports
• Remove reference to online balance when unmapping account
• Added feature to make DB password visible during input

For a full list of the changes please check out the changelog. We highly recommend upgrading to 5.0.2.

The KMyMoney Development Team

Get ready for the flood, because have loads of amazing stuff for you in this week’s Usability & Productivity update! There are a ton of pictures today, so hold onto your hats and be glad you don’t have to access the internet over a 56k modem (unless you do have to access the internet with a 56k modem, in which case, my condolences):

New Features

• Breeze emblem icons have been entirely redesigned, resulting in a more consistent visual style and better contrast against the icon they’re drawn on top of–and they’re much better-looking, too (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.52):
  
  
  
• Also re-did the package-related icons in a similar style (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.52):
  
  
• On Discover’s Updates page, it’s now possible to uncheck and re-check all available updates to make it easier to pick and choose the ones you want to apply (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)

Bugfixes

• KWin once again saves custom application/window settings (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.14.3)
• Discover no longer freezes for a moment when you view an app that’s available from distro repositories as well as a Flatpak version and then click on the “Sources” dropdown menu Flatpak repo (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.3
• The System Tray configuration page now displays correct icons for the Audio Volume and Networks entries (Kai Uwe Broulik and me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.14.3)
• Global keyboard shortcuts now work properly when using a non-US keyboard layout (Fabian Vogt, KDE Frameworks 5.52)
• The Workspace System Settings Page now looks good when using a fractional scale factor (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• In System Settings, the category name for KWin’s global shortcuts no longer changes semi-randomly (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Turning on NumLock at boot now works on Wayland (Martin Flöser, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• More Samba shares are now recognized and made configurable (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.52)
• In KMail, HTML emails are now readable when using a dark color theme (Laurent Montel, KDE PIM 5.10.0)

UI Polish & Improvement

• The Cuttlefish icon viewer tool now opens with keyboard focus on the search field and quits when you press Ctrl+q (Chris Holland, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
• Fixed a wide variety of issues with the Breeze-GTK theme–including many inconsistencies between the light and dark variants–and made it more maintainable so future improvements will be much easier (Matthias Groß, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• The Kickoff Application Menu now has subtle lines separating the content view from the header and tab bar (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• Re-worked the layout of several of the Folder View settings pages to better match the common style (me: nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• Tweaked many System Settings pages to standardize the icons, wording, and placement of the bottom buttons, most notably the “Get New [thing]…” buttons (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0). For example:
  
  
  
• The Baloo file indexer is now able to read tags from .asf files, read ape tags from .ape and .wavpack files, and read ID3 tags from .wav and .aiff files(Alexander Stippich, KDE Frameworks 5.52)
• Konsole now changes the icon of an inactive tab when it receives a bell signal so you can tell which tab received the signal (Andrew Smith, KDE Applications 18.12.0):
  
• In Konsole, when using default word-character settings, you can now double-click on a path that has a colon on the end of it without getting the trailing colon selected (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
• Kate can now be optionally configured to quit itself when the last tab is closed, just like Dolphin now does (Thomas Surrel, KDE Applications 18.12.0)

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can 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!

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

By a strange coincidence the news broke this morning that RHEL is deprecating KDE. The real surprise here is that RHEL supported KDE all.  Back in the 90s they were entirely against KDE and put lots of effort into our friendly rivals Gnome.  It made some sense since at the time Qt was under a not-quite-free licence and there’s no reason why a company would want to support another company’s lock in as well as shipping incompatible licences.  By the time Qt become fully free they were firmly behind Gnome.  Meanwhile Rex and a team of hard working volunteers packaged it anyway and gained many users.  When Red Hat was turned into the all open Fedora and the closed RHEL, Fedora was able to embrace KDE as it should but at some point the Fedora Next initiative again put KDE software in second place. Meanwhile RHEL did use Plasma 4 and hired a number of developers to help us in our time of need which was fabulous but all except one have left some time ago and nobody expected it to continue for long.

So the deprecation is not really new or news and being picked up by the news is poor timing for Red Hat, it’s unclear if they want some distraction from the IBM news or just The Register playing around.  The community has always been much better at supporting out software for their users, maybe now the community run EPEL archive can include modern Plasma 5 instead of being stuck on the much poorer previous release.

Plasma 5 is now lightweight and feature full.  We get new users and people rediscovering us every day who report it as the most usable and pleasant way to run their day.  From my recent trip in Barcelona I can see how a range of different users from university to schools to government consider Plasma 5 the best way to support a large user base.  We now ship on high end devices such as the KDE Slimbook down to the low spec value device of Pinebook.  Our software leads the field in many areas such as video editor Kdenlive, or painting app Krita or educational suite GCompris.  Our range of projects is wider than ever before with textbook project WikiToLearn allowing new ways to learn and we ship our own software through KDE Windows, Flatpak builds and KDE neon with Debs, Snaps and Docker images.

It is a pity that RHEL users won’t be there to enjoy it by default. But, then again, they never really were. KDE is collaborative, open, privacy aware and with a vast scope of interesting projects after 22 years we continue to push the boundaries of what is possible and fun.

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