Getting ready for Akademy 2024

In less than a week this year’s Akademy starts in Würzburg, Germany, and as usual I’m very much looking forward to that :)

I'm going to Akademy 2024!

Talks

Akademy starts with two days full of presentations. Online participation is possible as well, you can register here.

I have two talks myself.

KDE’s CI and CD Infrastructure

Sunday, 14:30 in room 1, together with Ben, Hannah and Julius, details.

We want to give an overview of the many parts and options we have around continuous integration and deployment since the migration from Jenkins to Gitlab, to enable more people to do changes and adjustments there themselves.

Finding your way around Akademy - Venue maps and indoor routing in Kongress

Saturday, 18:00 in room 1, details.

A lightning talk about the use of OSM indoor venue maps in our conference companion app Kongress.

BoFs

Following the talks there will be three days of meetings on various topics (“BoFs”). There’s fewer BoFs I’m (co-)hosting or otherwise directly involved in than last year:

  • KDE PIM (Monday 14:00)
  • CI/CD (Tuesday 15:00)

While that should be a bit less stressful, those will be very busy days nevertheless, with already now too many sessions on the schedule I’d like to participate in.

And of course every event essentially is just one big Itinerary BoF in disguise.

Qt Contributor Summit

Right before Akademy there’s also the Qt Contributor Summit in Würzburg.

I have been asked to give a short presentation on experiences with migrating to Qt 6 and maintaining software on top of Qt 6, both from the KDE and from my work perspective. Currently that’s planned for the morning talks session on Thursday.

Kongress

And as usual there’s also code to finish before Akademy. This time the important one has been the venue map integration for Kongress. Not only does this have to be ready for my talk about it, it’s also meant to be used at Akademy.

Time-dependent maps

A big part still missing in the previous post was support for time-dependent content. While conceptually clear (OSM has time-conditional tags and we have an parser/evaluator for the opening hours expressions used in those) I was still hoping we might get away without that.

And we would now (again), but there was an intermediate state of the Akademy schedule until two days ago where “Room 1” referred to a different physical room on Saturday and Sunday than during the rest of the week. While that might sound confusing, this is actually not unusual, so properly supporting all that makes sense anyway.

With the rooms now having distinct names again I can’t easily demonstrate the full power of time-dependent content anymore, but you’ll still notice that the venue map looks different depending on which day you open it (by opening it from events on different dates, or by waiting a week).

Android dark mode support

To look good for the occasion we now also have proper Android dark mode support in KDE Frameworks, thanks to Julius’s recent work on icon recoloring, and the necessary changes in Kongress will be part of 24.08.1.

Screenshot of Kongress in the Android emulator showing light on dark colors for controls, texts and icons.
Kongress on Android in dark mode.

xCal support

With September being packed with conferences, another problem has become pressing for Kongress as well: Pretalx (a widely used open source conference management software) apparently removed access to the schedule in iCal format, something Kongress relies on. Akademy isn’t affected due to using a different system, but SotM or the Matrix Conference are.

As a solution we could roll out quickly I added basic xCal read support to KF::CalendarCore, a format Pretalx still supports. This has been integrated yesterday and should make it in the September update of KDE Frameworks.

Itinerary

Since conferences involve travel for most people, Itinerary can’t go without attention either.

For making coordination of train trips easier, the “Share Journey” links you’ll get from Deutsche Bahn’s website can now be directly imported.

Akademy and all its sub-events are machine-readable on their corresponding websites as usual, and thus can also be imported by pasting/opening/dropping the corresponding URLs in(to) Itinerary.

The day trip shows some limitations though, we don’t have a good way to model that yet. It’s now imported as an event, but ideally it would be two bus trips, so you have the most crucial information (places and times of the bus departures) included.

Itinerary supports bus trips, but we have a few specialties here. The departure location of the return trip is still unknown (expecting that to be where we get dropped off), so this needs to be editable. For bus trips however Itinerary doesn’t allow arbitrary changes when editing, so you can’t accidentally end up with something that can no longer be matched against realtime data. That’s however irrelevant for chartered buses, those don’t show up on any schedule anyway.

So that bus trip is actually less of a bus trip in the public transport sense, but more an individual transport trip (ie. similar to taking your own bike or car). And that’s something we don’t support in Itinerary at all yet. If you have input on how that should look like, I’d be happy to hear that in the Itinerary Matrix channel!

Hoping nobody gets lost due to an Itinerary bug on the way and very much looking forward to seeing many of you next week in Würzburg!