Krita Sprint 2014, Saturday Meeting

[Boudewijn Rempt]

We had a Krita Sprint in Deventer this weekend, and here's the notes from 
the Saturday morning meeting. We discussed a bunch of things, some 
relevant for Calligra as a whole, so I'm sending the notes to two mailing 
lists.

* Krita Foundation

The Krita Foundation currently has about 7000 euros to sponsor development 
with. We're going to do a big fundraiser really soon, too, the kickstarter 
project page is nearly done.

The new splash screen helps a lot: one-off donations are seriously up 
already.


* 2.9 and 3.0

We would like 2.9 to be the last Qt4-based release. A precondition for 
this release is merging the Model-View-Controller branch (because that is 
a huge refactoring that makes porting easier). 2.9 will also have loads of 
interesting stuff for users to be happy while we port to Qt5.

We think that the 3.0 release should be as pure a port to Qt5 as possible. 
No new features, just porting as quickly and purely as possible, release 
and then go on with 3.1 (where we might want to start using the new OpenGL 
framework from Qt5, btw).

>From previous experience with the sailfish qt5 branch, it would be a good 
thing to close master for a week while a volunteer does the mechanical 
parts of porting in one go: sanitizing, search and replace and all that 
sort of thing. After that effort is done, we can all pitch in and start 
fixing problems.

It should be doable to port to Qt5 in just 3 months, which leaves us with 
two options:

 	* release the pure port as 3.0 when it's done, then go and work on 
new stuff.
 	* after the port is done, go on doing stuff until it's time for 
the regular release.


* KF5

For Krita and calligra-libs, limiting our KF5 dependencies to Tier1 
(karchive, k18n, kconfig, extra-cmake-modules) makes a lot of sense.

* MVC branch

We're afraid we're going to run into a brick wall here. The MVC branch is 
a _big_ refactoring, and basically touches every Calligra application 
except for Kexi (because Kexi doesn't use the Calligra platform 
libraries).

It isn't feasible for the Krita team to port all Calligra applications, 
and many of our applications are unmaintained. As far as we can see, there 
are three options:

* everyone chipping in to fix applications to work with mvc
* removing broken, unmaintained applications
* forking the calligra platform applications and make them krita-specific, 
which would sort of put Krita on the same footing as Kexi.

* Text and Vector shapes

After 3.0, we want to take a real hard look at how Krita uses vector 
shapes from the flake library. The ODG part of flake doesn't make a lot of 
sense, and what we need from a text shape is much more fine-grained 
control over typography. But any work on this is a long way in the future.

* String and translation problems

Our use of strings is often inconsistent and this is a problem for 
translators. We are also missing context in a lot of places. The Krita 
Foundation would like to sponsor Dmitry to meet up with a translator and 
artist in St. Petersburg where they can go over all the i18n calls in 
Krita with a fine-toothed comb and make them commented and consistent.

This should also result in list of terms for things that we can use in the 
documentation effort Wolthera is spear-heading.

On the topic of documentation, Animtim is busy organizing a booksprint. He 
is trying to get subsidy for that project from the EU.

* Discoverability and what's-this

We suck when it comes to tooltips. Sven has begun an extension of the 
what's this system that will allow a user to click on a widget and create 
a tooltip that can be submitted for commit.

* Smudge Length vs Smudge Rate

We decided that length is the best word

* OpenGL

Qt's painting engine is very slow on Windows, and Leinir proposed to make 
OpenGL enabled by default. We decided to do that on all platforms and this 
change was committed in fb524d4075de0d45f269d7459d5a7cbf3de3c6e8

Qt5 and Tablet Support

Boud and Dmitry will join the Qt Developer Summit in Berlin to work 
together with two digians on tablet support in Qt5.

----

Later on we had painting sessions, group photo, barbecue, hacking, 
painting, discussions and more -- but this was the meeting :-)



Boudewijn