This is my last update about my GSoC project (Python bindings for KDE Frameworks).

These weeks have been quieter than usual because I’ve been on vacation, but there are still some new things to share.

I published a mini tutorial on how to generate Python bindings using the new CMake module.

People have started to test the Python bindings and some building issues have been reported (which is good, because that means people have interest in them). Unfortunately I’m going to have less time to contribute as I start university next week, but I’m sure you’ll see me!

Many thanks to Carl (my mentor) and everyone who reviewed my merge requests!

Calligra 4.0.1 is out. This small releases mostly contains fixes for distributions issues and updated translations.

I fixed some compatibility issues for Flatpak which is since yesterday available on Flathub.

Yaakov Selkowitz fixed the installation of the Okular generators so now if Calligra is installed, you can read your office document in Okular correctly.

Antonio Rojas dropped the unused KPart dependency and reenabled the user documentations.

I removed the old space navigator plugin which didn’t build anymore and was only used to navigate an office document with some retro controllers.

Finally, I fixed a few issues in Stage, I found while dog footing it for my slides for my Akademy presentation.

Get It

Calligra 4.0 is now available on Flathub. It’s also now available on Arch, KDE Neon and OpenBSD and I am aware there is some work in progress for Fedora and Mageia. Thanks everyone for packaging Calligra!

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Here's our bi-monthly update from KDE's personal information management applications team. This report covers progress made in July and August 2024.

Since the last report, 32 people have contributed over 1300 changes to the KDE PIM code base. We also released a new version of the KDE PIM Suite in August with the Gear release

Akademy

The KDE PIM team will be at Akademy from the 7th to the 12th of September in Würzburg (Germany). We will host again a PIM BoF on Monday from 14h to 16h.

Milestones

We have decided to plan and track our work in milestones. Milestones represent concrete goals with clear definitions of what we understand as done, and be achievable within a reasonable time frame. Each milestone is then split into smaller bite-sized tasks that can be worked on independently.

This helps us prioritize important work, make our progress more visible and, most importantly, make it easier for people to get excited about what we are working on. New contributors will also be able to pick a well-defined task and start contributing to PIM.

You can see the milestones on our Gitlab board. If anything there catches your eye and you would like to help, reach out to us on the #kontact:kde.org Matrix channel!

Retiring KJots and KNotes

We made some progress on this front and KNotes was not part of the 24.08 release. The repositories for KNotes and KJots are now archived and the remaining bits related to the Akonadi Note support were removed from KOrganizer, Calendar Support, KDE PIM Runtime, and Event Views.

Moving Protocol Implementations to KDE Frameworks

Volker continued to cleanup and optimize KMime in preparation for moving it to the KDE Frameworks. KMime is the library used to parse and write emails.

Itinerary

Our travel assistant app Itinerary got a new seat information display in the timeline, integration with the Träwelling check-in service, more use of Wikidata/Wikimedia online content and a pretty new website. See its own bi-monthly update for more details.

Kleopatra

Over the last two months the smart card views for the different types of supported smart cards got a facelift to make them look more unified and less crowded (T7018).

Kleopatra now supports disabling OpenPGP certificates (T7216). This is sometimes useful to prevent accidentally using a certificate for encryption.

We improved the usability in

• signing and encryption (T6485, T7183, T7236),
• the list of certifications that now only shows the relevant ones (T7231),
• the certificate group configuration (T6966),
• changing the expiration of subkeys (T7198, T7215).

Akregator

Akregator is the RSS feed reader integrated into Kontact. Laurent reimplemented the filter bar to avoid multiple clicks and it is now similar to the one from Thunderbird.

Akregator now supports Plasma Activities so you can select which feeds are visible depending on the activity you are in. Similar functionalities are planned for KMail, KOrganizer and KAddressBook.

Finally, Akregator now has a What's New dialog showing the changes from the last version.

KMail

KMail now uses less memory by only loading some widgets when needed.

MimeTreeParser/Merkuro

We have unified the verification message for signed messages between Kleopatra, KMail and Merkuro by moving the implementation to LibKleo.

KAlarm

We replaced the libcanberra audio backend with VLC, since libcanberra is unmaintained and does not recognise recent audio formats. There is also the option for distributions to use MPV as audio backend.

Kdenlive 24.08 is out, and while summer is usually a quieter time for the team, this update comes packed with nifty new features, enhancements, and quality-of-life improvements, specially for Effects and Transitions. This version boosts performance in sequence playback and timeline preview rendering, improves handling of transcoding issues when importing large amounts of clips, adds VAAPI transcode profiles, and fixes GPU transcoding for Nvidia. On the packaging front, Whisper support has been improved for both Windows and macOS while also improving timing issues on all platforms.

Effects and Transitions

This release comes with many improvements to Effects and Transitions that were made possible thanks to your contributions to our fundraiser.

Easing Modes

In addition to the existing easing modes (linear, smooth, and constant), we've added several new options like: Cubic In/Out, Exponential In/Out, Circular In/Out, Elastic In/Out, and Bounce In/Out for transitions and effects.

Effect Groups

The new Effect Groups feature enables you to control and apply changes to all clips within a group or selection, making the effect editing process more flexible.

Transform Effect UX

This release brings  several enhancements to the Transform effect, improving both usability and functionality. The handles’ visuals have been refined by adding more control points for easier adjustments. Now, you can move the frame from anywhere inside it, with the handles automatically disappearing during the move for a cleaner view. Also holding Alt+Click lets you cycle through clips without needing to select them in the timeline. We’ve also added a grid to the monitor, allowing clips to snap into place while moving.

Curve Editor

This version introduces an initial prototype of the highly anticipated curve editor for keyframes. Please note that it is in a very alpha state and is not ready for production.

Other Highlights

This release includes over 130 commits. Here are a few highlights:

• Fixed many Python related issues
• Fixed Titles background issues
• Added timestamps to undo commands
• Fixed many crashes in various operations
• Add Actions to quickly add Marker/Guides in a specific category
• Run callback server for OAuth2 only if necessary.
• Fixed issues with custom Clip Jobs
• Fixed audio recording regressions

Next week Akademy, KDE’s annual community conference, will take place in Würzburg, Germany. There are a few features that I actually began during various conferences throughout the years to address real-world problems. I decided to have look at some of them again that would be most useful for people travelling to Akademy from abroad or who will be giving a presentation there.

Wifi QR Code Scanner

Two years ago at Akademy in Barcelona the venue Wifi details were printed onto our attendee badges as QR code. Already during the conference I started adding a scanner to the networks menu using our fantastic Prison Framework scanner feature. However, with Qt 6 at the horizon and its significant changes to Qt Multimedia I didn’t pursuit it further at the time. Then, whenever I attended another sprint or got to a hotel where they handed out Wifi QR codes, I was reminded that I still haven’t finished the thing.

Still, all prerequisites under the hood have long been merged. The first task was to move the MeCard parser (the format used for those QR codes) from the QRCA scanner app into a shared location. Since MeCard can even contain WPA-EAP configuration I wanted to have the logic for setting up NetworkManager accordingly shared, too. In preparation for adding a sub-page for the camera viewfinder I replaced the full-screen QR code generator with an integrated one.

A huge challenge was that we either need to add a new connection or update an existing one with new credentials. It took me forever to figure out why it wouldn’t update the Wifi passphrase on my network: I’m meanwhile using WPA3-SAE at home! The code for setting up NetworkManager from MeCard didn’t handle “T=SAE” and thus didn’t generate any credentials. Funnily enough, our MeCard generator did. Once that was sorted, the code worked as intended.

However, after a lot of back and forth I abandoned the idea of putting it in the Network applet directly. Using Qt Multimedia, potentially loading a bunch of backends and codecs is probably not something we want to have in the shell. Instead, I will look into adding a button to the Network settings module instead. In the meantime, you can always use QRCA to scan a code a Wifi code.

Location-aware time zone setting

Last year’s Akademy was located in Thessaloniki, Greece which is in a different time zone for many of its attendees. Our phones automatically adjust to that using the cellular network and we don’t even think about it. Frequently during the conference people were confused which talk will come next when their laptop and phone disagreed on the time. Therefore, I wrote a daemon that automatically adjusts the time zone based on your physical location.

For privacy, this uses KDE’s own GeoIP endpoint and is opt-in. It is also disabled when connected to a VPN (the endpoint could be in an entirely different location after all) or a metered connection. We’re considering adding a checkbox to Plasma’s Welcome Center on its “Privacy” page to make the feature more discoverable for laptop users. However, there’s still a few quirks to be ironed out to ensure that our users don’t bring down the server hosting that service since by definition you cannot put that sort of thing behind a CDN.

I can’t wait to travel to Würzburg next week. Given the convenient location I am positive that a lot of people and “old-timers” that I haven’t seen around in a while will stop by to say hello. Come join us, attendance is free and it’s always great fun!

Next Saturday, this year’s Akademy starts in Würzburg, Germany. After a rather long absence – the last Akademy I attended in person was in Mechelen (2008) – I am very much looking forward to meet old friends and make new ones. Mainly due to my own summer vacation plans and conflicting family matters, I was not able to make it to the event in recent years. Now, as the venue is only just over 100 kilometers from my home and I have no other commitments, I’m traveling to

My plan is to arrive on Friday late afternoon and join the welcome event. The conference schedule is pretty loaded and I have only decided on a few talks I definitely want to visit. For more, I need to take another look at the schedule and also the list of planned BoFs on Monday and Tuesday.

Topics I am interested in are (not in a particular order)

1. Getting KMyMoney to be properly build on the CI/CD for MacOS (both ARM and x86_64)
2. Meet people in person I only know from the online world
3. What is needed on the project configuration (Gitlab, metadata) side to move onto KF6

For 1. I hope to get some more background information out of the KDE’s CI and CD Infrastructure talk held by Ben, Hannah, Julius and Volker on Sunday and the CI/CD BoF on Tuesday.. For other topics I will see.

Looking forward to seeing many of you KDE fellows next week in Würzburg!

The first Kdenlive Café of the year will be on Tuesday, September 3rd at 7PM UTC (9PM CET).

Come chat with the team!

Join us at: https://meet.kde.org/b/far-twm-eb

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-35.

Telegram is neither “secure” nor “encrypted”

Tags: tech, telegram, security, privacy

Here a good reminder that the PR of Telegram is highly misleading. It’s not very secure, they don’t really care about your privacy.

https://rys.io/en/171.html

How Telegram’s Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr

Tags: tech, telegram, law

Yes, such an arrest is concerning. Now, lots of people are voicing the wrong concerns… this article actually does a good job explaining it.

https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/

Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst?

Tags: tech, foss, values, licensing, fundraising

I’m not sure the “bubble” comparison properly applies. Still there are indeed signs of the Open Source movement getting in troubles. It’ll be all the more important to stick to the Free Software values.

https://tarakiyee.com/is-the-open-source-bubble-about-to-burst/

Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again

Tags: tech, foss, licensing

It’s about time… I wish they would have gone for the AGPL + proprietary double license scheme instead of their odd licenses the last time.

https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-again

Top Programming Languages 2024 - IEEE Spectrum

Tags: tech, language

Interesting to see Typescript and Rust picking up pace slowly. Otherwise Python, Java, Javascript and C++ are still the big four overall. For jobs, C# and SQL are good to have in your tool belt.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2024

What RSS Needs

Tags: tech, rss

Very good list of the challenges ahead for RSS as a popular protocol. It’d be great to see some of it being tackled.

https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/08/25/feeds

OpenSSH Backdoors

Tags: tech, supply-chain, security, linux

Interesting comparison between old attempts at backdooring OpenSSH and the latest xz attempt. There are lessons to be learned from this. It makes a good case for starting to sandbox everything.

https://blog.isosceles.com/openssh-backdoors/

Bypassing airport security via SQL injection

Tags: tech, security, airline

Woops, this was clearly a very bad security issue allowing to completely bypass airport security screening in the US.

https://ian.sh/tsa

SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL

Tags: tech, databases, sql

Looks like an interesting way to improve SQL. This feels like a nice extension, it’s much better than throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

https://research.google/pubs/sql-has-problems-we-can-fix-them-pipe-syntax-in-sql/

Python’s Preprocessor

Tags: tech, programming, python, metaprogramming

Interesting to see how far you can go preprocessing Python.

https://pydong.org/posts/PythonsPreprocessor/

Don’t use complex expressions in if conditions | Volodymyr Gubarkov

Tags: tech, programming, maintenance

Definitely a good advice, I see very complex expressions in if (or while BTW) conditions way too often. They tend to accumulate over time.

https://maximullaris.com/if_condition.html

Why Playwright is less flaky than Selenium

Tags: tech, web, frontend, tests, performance, reliability

Interesting reason which would explain the Selenium flakiness. It’s just harder to write tests with race conditions using Playwright.

https://justin.searls.co/links/2024-08-29-why-playwright-is-less-flaky-than-selenium/

Putting a meaningful dent in your error backlog

Tags: tech, monitoring, reliability, debugging

How to avoid drowning in errors when getting serious about monitoring. Finding class of errors and treating them one by one will definitely help.

https://blog.danslimmon.com/2024/08/15/putting-a-meaningful-dent-in-your-error-backlog/

There can’t be only one

Tags: tech, design, databases

A weird detour via baseball obscure rules to justify why we should pay attention to the “Highlander problem”. This should be kept in mind especially for designing databases.

https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2024/aug/27/highlander-problem/

Building with purpose

Tags: tech, business, architecture

Definitely something architects should do more. Understanding the business needs should be the input to the technical decisions. Otherwise you might just happily build the wrong thing.

https://cremich.cloud/building-with-purpose

Bye for now!

A while ago a colleague of mine asked about our crash infrastructure in Plasma and whether I could give some overview on it. This seems very useful to others as well, I thought. Here I am, telling you all about it!

Our crash infrastructure is comprised of a number of different components.

• KCrash: a KDE Framework performing crash interception and prepartion for handover to…
• coredumpd: a systemd component performing process core collection and handover to…
• DrKonqi: a GUI for crashes sending data to…
• Sentry: a web service and UI for tracing and presenting crashes for developers

We’ve looked at KCrash previously. This time we look at coredumpd.

Coredumpd

coredumpd collects all crashes happening on the system, through the core_pattern system. It is shipped as part of systemd and as such mostly available out of the box.

It is fairly sophisticated and can manage the backlog of crashes, so old crashes get cleaned out from time to time. It also tightly integrates with journald giving us a well-defined interface to access crash metadata.

But before we dive into the inner workings of coredumpd, let’s talk about cores.

What are cores?

A core, or more precisely: a core dump file, is a copy of the memory image of a process and its process status (registers, mappings, etc.) in a file. Simply put, it’s like we took a copy of the running process from RAM and stored it in a file. The purpose of such a core is that it allows us to look at a snapshot of the process at that point in time without having the process still running. Using this data, we can perform analysis of the process to figure out what exactly went wrong and how we ended up in that situation.

The advantage is that since the process doesn’t need to be running anymore, we can investigate crashes even hours or days after they happened. That is of particular use when things crash while we are not able to deal with them immediately. For example if Plasma were to crash on logout there’d be no way to deal with it besides stopping the logout, which may not even be possible anymore. Instead we let the crash drop into coredumpd, let it collect a core file, and on next login we can tell the user about the crash.

With that out of the way, it’s time to dump a core!

Core Dumps

We already talked about KCrash and how it intercepts crashes to write some metadata to disk. Once it is done it calls raise() to generate one of those core dumps we just discussed. This actually very briefly turns over control to the kernel which will more or less simply invoke the defined core_pattern process. In our case, coredumpd.

coredumpd will immediately systemd-socket-activate itself and forward the data received from the kernel. In other words: it will start an instance of systemd-coredump@.service and the actual processing will happen in there. The advantage of this is that regular systemd security configuration can be applied as well as cgroup resource control and all that jazz — the core dumping happens in a regular systemd service.

The primary task here is to actually write the dump to a file. In addition, coredumpd will also collect lots of additional metadata besides what is in the core already. Most notably various bits and pieces of /proc information such as cgroup information, mount information, the auxillary vector (auxv), etc.

Once all the data is collected a journald entry is written and the systemd-coredump@.service instance quits again.

The journal entry will contain the metadata as entry fields as well as the path of the core dump on disk, so we can later access it. It essentially serves as a key-value store for the crash data. A severely shortened version looks like this:

Tue 2024-08-27 17:52:27.593233 CEST […]
    COREDUMP_UID=60106
    COREDUMP_GID=60106
    COREDUMP_SIGNAL_NAME=SIGSYS
    COREDUMP_SIGNAL=31
    COREDUMP_TIMESTAMP=1724773947000000
    COREDUMP_COMM=wine64
    COREDUMP_FILENAME=/var/lib/systemd/coredump/core.wine64.….zst
    …

Example

Since this is all rather abstract, we can look at a trivial example to illustrate things a bit better.

Let’s open two terminals. In the first we can watch the journal for the crash to appear.

journalctl -xef SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=systemd-coredump

In the second terminal we run an instance of sleep in the background, and then trigger a segmentation fault crash.

sleep 99999999999&
kill -SEGV $!

In the first terminal you’ll see the crash happening:

Aug 27 15:01:49 ajax systemd-coredump[35535]: Process 35533 (sleep) of user 60106 terminated abnormally with signal 11/SEGV, processing...
Aug 27 15:01:49 ajax systemd-coredump[35549]: [🡕] Process 35533 (sleep) of user 60106 dumped core.

                                              Stack trace of thread 35533:
                                              #0  0x0000729f1b961dc0 n/a (/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 + 0x1cdc0)
                                              ELF object binary architecture: AMD x86-64

So far so interesting. “But where is the additional data from /proc hiding?” you might wonder. We need to look at the verbose entry to see all data.

journalctl -o verbose SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=systemd-coredump

This actually already concludes coredumpd’s work. In the next post DrKonqi will step onto the stage.