[dot] A Wonderful Second FOSDEM Day

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1172531491/

From: Jos Poortvliet and Niels van Mourik <>
Dept: thousands-of-geeks
Date: Monday 26/Feb/2007, @15:11

A Wonderful Second FOSDEM Day
=============================

   The second day of FOSDEM 2007 [http://fosdem.org/2007] was as busy,
if not more, as the first day. Many face-to-face interactions, of great
benefit to cooperation between developers and projects, and time spend
on hacking on and promoting KDE. The KDE developer room was well used,
first by an Educational workshop, well led by Anne-Marie Mahfouf,
followed by some more talks. Topics included Krita's present and future
by Bart Coppens, a KDE 4 talk by Jos Poortvliet and a KDE e.V. talk by
Sebastian Kügler. Read on for a report on day two.
    The Educational Workshop brought together developers from several
projects.


                               EDUCATION

     Everyone interested in free Educational applications gathered in
the KDE developer room to listen to a talks. Many of those quickly
turned into discussions about cooperation between developers from the
different applications, and ways of easily managing all the software and
settings for teachers. Finally, the discussion led to the agreement
there was more communication and cooperation needed, especially for
creating bridges between the several management systems. Specifically
mentioned was the Get Hot New Stuff framework in KDE, which is used by
many of the KDE Edu applications to download and install data like
dictionaries or additional lessons. Several ideas came up, asking local
network support so the teacher can distribute lessons or other data to
the students and upload integration in Get Hot New Stuff. Integration in
KIOSK would make these much easier to manage for the teachers. Another
problem is that the most used server for GHNS data, kde-files.org, isn't
owned by KDE, and the Edu people don't have access to it. So when users
upload useful data, for example for Khangman, but there is a small bug
in the file, it can't be fixed unless the submitter steps in - which
isn't always the case. And of course, if the maintainer(s) of
kde-files.org decides to move on to another hobby, the data should be
preserved some way - and this can't be ensured right now. The conclusion
was to ask the KDE e.V. to step in here. They can probably help fund a
new site for the data, or make an agreement with the current
kde-files.org website owner.



                             CROSS DESKTOP

     During the educational track, we joined the Gnome Developer Room
for  a Cross-Desktop
[http://fosdem.org/2007/schedule/devrooms/crossdesktop] series of talks,
where search engine Strigi, query standard Wasabi, instant messenging
backend Telepathy and others where discussed. Many KDE developers 
attended these talks and participated in the discussions. The technology
behind Strigi, the tool delivering indexing, metadata and database
functionality to KDE 4, was discussed. Wasabi is a project to develop
specifications and APIs for search and meta-data services. It has partly
been initiated by the Strigi author, Jos van den Oever and intends to
unify desktop search interfaces so users can have applications use
whatever search tool they want. Finally, Telepathy is a set of
specifications and API's designed for chat and VOIP, and will be used in
Kopete and supported by Decibel in KDE 4.



                     KRITA, THE PRESENT AND FUTURE

     After the Educational and Cross-Desktop tracks, the first KDE talk
was done by Bart Coppens about Krita, the image manipulation application
of the Koffice project [http://www.koffice.org/]. He spoke about the
present situation and highlighted the neat new functionality available
since Krita 1.6, like tablet support, layer masks and smudging very
well. Bart then told about the "Feature Thaw", which means the KOffice
developers add features in the form of additional effects and plugins to
the stable branch of Krita. The second part of his presentation was
about the future of Krita and KOffice. The change to KDE 4 and the work
going on in the internals of KOffice 2 prompted the Krita team to
rethink, redesign and improve several core technologies to improve
integration with the rest of KDE and KOffice. Some of these changes
include the use of the new core KDE 4 technologies like Phonon, Kross
(scripting framework) and Flake, the new lightweight embeding framework
of KOffice. Another proposal Bart mentioned was the implementation of
the Open Raster file format, which other projects like the Gimp are also
working on.



                           KDE 4 PRESENTATION
   The KDE 4 Talk had the audience standing in the aisles.
     Jos Poortvliet entertained an overcrowded and enthusiastic devroom
with a talk about KDE 4. Clearly, the community is curious to know about
the new KDE release. First Jos summarised the current situation and
achievements made so far, which have lead to a consistent and stable
user experience. Next he elaborated on the development on the
foundations of KDE 4. Jos showed dozens of very juicy screenshots,
highlighted minor and bigger improvements - even though it's hardly
possible to touch more than the surface of KDE 4 in a 45 minute talk.
Still, focussing on the pillars of Solid, Phonon and Plasma, he gave a
nice overall picture of the articles on the Planet, the Dot and
development itself. A few questions came, concerning cross-desktop
cooperation, some features, and of course 'when will KDE 4 be released'.



                              THE KDE E.V.
   The KDE stall sold out of merchandise.
     The last talk was by Sebastian Kügler, concerning KDE e.V. and the
legal underpinnings of the KDE project. He explained the role and
structure of the e.V., and the way it tries to support the KDE
development without any interference in technical issues.

     There was a question about the lack of a legal mailing list. The
questionner explained the IDABC [http://europa.eu.int/idabc/] project
has recently been set up by the European Union which wants to ensure and
safeguard interoperability and cooperation in the area of software
development in Europe. Sebas and the other attendees agreed setting up a
line of contact to this group would be a great thing, and will be
brought up in the KDE e.V. board meeting. One of the attendees then
brought up the existing (but not very alive) KDE licensing mailing list,
which will be looked into as well. Also, a news story about IDABC will
be written to explain its purpose and what it can do for the KDE project
in the area of legal advice and support.

     Outside the KDE room, Amarok promoter Sven Krohlas gave a lightning
talk about the advanced features in Amarok including dynamic playlists
and how suggested tracks works with last.fm integration.

     All in all, the second FOSDEM day was productive and fun for the
KDE people.  Many thanks to the team from KDE-NL who organised the
schedule and staffed the busy stall for two days demonstrating KDE 4,
Amarok 2 and selling out of merchandise.

     Slides from all these talks can be found on the KDE slides page.
 [http://www.kde.org/kdeslides/]