Building on Windows I'm getting failures by anongit.kde.org's git server

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Fri, 2012-12-07 at 16:00 +0100, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> Am Freitag, 7. Dezember 2012, 13:22:48 schrieb Philip Van Hoof:
> > On Fri, 2012-12-07 at 12:54 +0100, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:

> > The qtcontacts-tracker backend was written mostly by Mathias Hasselmann
> > and Adrien Bustany I think. I contributed some small things to the
> > package but most of my work was on Tracker's SPARQL endpoint on the N9.
> 
> Ha, I happened to be part of the team which worked on qtcontacts-tracker for 
> some time as well (that I tried to hint to before), but surely there was no 
> reason for my name to stick with you, given tracker in the middle of the ... 
> say, action, and so many people interacting with you, and with Mathias and 
> Adrien also the main persons of our backend, okay :)

Oh cool. Yeah, there were a lot of people at Nokia working with sparql.
Luckily for us usually behind layers like you guy's qtcontacts-tracker

:)

Nice to know that you worked directly with sparql and nepomuk on the n9.
That experience will definitely help with RDF support in Calligra!

Although I don't need it for my current project, I definitely noticed
that this is being developed in Calligra and at some point I am going to
look into it, I'm sure.

I recall that Jos Van Den Oever (strigi/libstreams) was at some point
also active in adding RDF support to KOffice, or something? Is Jos still
involved? I still think that libstreamanalyzer could be used in
Tracker's metadata extraction infrastructure. Long time ago that I last
spoke Jos, though.

> But good to know you around now here for at least now a little, as RDF support 
> in ODF/Calligra could need some more effort, and I am close to pick up my 
> left-over knowledge to brush things up here, so discussions might arise which 
> will need wise people to comment on :)

Sure :)
 
> > This is for a customer who has a valid Windows use-case. It comes down
> > to "it'll work on Windows and MacOS X, or no Calligra". Regretfully.
> > 
> > So far I did a proof of concept on Linux. It's all looking great and
> > hugely promising. Next step is Windows support.
> 
> Sounds good. Really great to see Calligra reaching more and more serious 
> ground, after all the years of rather hope in KOffice/Calligra :)

Yeah. There is definitely still some work to do before it's really
attractive to Windows developers, as most of them are not so much into
trying to build half a KDE desktop ;-).

But it sure looks promising for future. I don't think there is anything
like Calligra (that also does rendering of office documents pretty well)
and that is usable as components in a library - and is LGPL (not
unimportant).

> For the record, but I assume you know it, just for the rest reading:
> e.g. the KO GmbH (whose hat I only have on when writing with the proper email 
> address, not this kde.org one :) ) is happy to partner up on the Windows 
> support, after all they/we are doing the experimental Windows packaging of 
> Calligra (just the RC1 build is right now blocked by internal problem, should 
> be fixed soon) and also serious projects with Calligra code on Windows.

Yes, I've mentioned this at my customer too as I noticed that Boudewijn
Rempt, who has helped me quite a bit already, also works at this company
and I figured from you the website that you guys can indeed give
consultancy and advise on this.

Their reply on this of my customer was, so far, something like 'hmm,
interesting. But let's try ourselves first'. Fair enough, so I'm now
trying :-) -- aargh, windows development. it hurts!! --

> So you are not the only one interested in having it work there and being easy 
> to develop with, with the other hat on even I am, or, have too :P (as I prefer 
> another OS).

:-)

I think we all do.

> So it would be e.g. a help/nice start if you could note down what you yourself 
> expect from an SDK, perhaps even some helpful related links (specs, creation, 
> bla), either in a new wiki page somewhere below 
> http://community.kde.org/Calligra or by just filing a feature/bug request with 
> https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=calligracommon&format=guided

Will do. But I guess I need to just start working on this experiment to
know or get some experience on what is needed for such an SDK to be easy
to use.

But for average Windows developers: CalligraSDK-setup.exe that installs
an SDK and prepares their Visual Studio 2010 development environment
with intelliSense and C# bindings and all that stuff :-)

If I were KO GmbH I'd sell such a package alongside a support contract,
or something. If I look at for example LibXL's price, which doesn't do
any rendering (Calligra does) and is only for spreadsheets, there sure
is a market for this.

But then again, this is a open-source desktop's mailing list and I guess
I don't need to do KO's marketing ;-)

> It all starts with a first step :)

Yep, that's true.

Kind regards and good to know that KO GmbH exists.

Philip


-- 


Philip Van Hoof
Software developer
Codeminded BVBA - http://codeminded.be