introduction and questions

[Be]

Hi

I have been going between a handful of music player applications since I
got my current laptop ~2.5 years ago with a 3840 x 2160 screen and the
Amarok Qt5 port was never finished so it doesn't scale to high pixel
density screens. I've mostly been using Rhythmbox even though I find its
GUI quite bland and a little awkward -- it does job. I was using
Lollypop for a while which was quite interesting. I stopped using
Lollypop after the lead developer was bizarrely stubborn and refused to
merge a feature to delete files from the application (
https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/lollypop/-/issues/605 ). I tried Elisa
then but found it too buggy at the time for daily use and went back to
Rhythmbox.

I just gave Elisa another try and it's coming along well. I'm really
impressed by the beautiful adaptive design. It makes me want a Librem 5
even more. :)

I installed 20.08.3 from Flathub and opened a few feature requests and
bug reports. I built Elisa from the master Git branch to check if some
of the bugs I found were already fixed. Unfortunately when I built it
locally, the GUI is very slow. I don't know if this is because of a bug
in Elisa or my system. I'm running Fedora 33 with Qt 5.15.1 and KDE
Frameworks 5.75.0. I see these messages repeated in the console output
with the local build:

qrc:/qml/ContextView.qml:269:37: Unable to assign [undefined] to QString
Qt Quick Layouts: Polish loop detected. Aborting after two iterations.

I can reproduce the slowness when I build the v20.08.3 tag locally. I
don't see the above messages in the console output.

Also, if I build the CMake install target as I usually do to install to
~/local, Elisa fails to load the QML files. I searched the Qt
documentation if there is some environment variable to tell it where to
search but did not find anything. If I run the binary from the CMake
build directory it works.

QQmlApplicationEngine failed to load component
qrc:/qml/ElisaMainWindow.qml:12:1: module "org.kde.elisa" is not installed

I was a KDE user for many (10?) years before I got my current laptop and
switched to GNOME for the better high pixel density support. I still use
some KDE applications, particularly KDevelop. I wrote a little JS plugin
for Amarok years ago before I learned C++ but I haven't contributed code
to KDE before.

Most of the coding I do is for Mixxx where I am a maintainer. Mixxx also
uses C++ and Qt. The GUI uses a home-baked XML layout system for
QWidgets that predates Qt's .ui files. We're planning on experimenting
with QML for some upcoming features which might eventually lead to
redoing the main window in QML. I haven't worked with QML before so
maybe I can learn by working on Elisa. :)

Is there any chat system for Elisa or is this mailing list the primary
means of communication? I looked for an Elisa room on the KDE Matrix
server but there is not one.