New on this mailing list ;-)

[Juraj Oravec]

On sobota 11. novembra 2023 11:16:04 CET Jens wrote:
> Hi,

Hello,

> I am new on this mailing list. I am located in Germany.

Welcome.

> Yesterday I discovered Falkon as part of the KDE Desktop Environment
> on kde.org and installed Falkon on my machine with Debian 12
> ("Bookworm") from the Debian repositories.
> 
> I found out that the version of Falkon which the Debian repositories
> provide for the current stable Debian 12 version is quite old.

Falkon version is often not that important since it depends on 
QtWebEngine which provides the thing which actualy does the internet 
stuff. Falkon kind of does the user interface and stuff around.
So what is the most important is the QtWebEngine version which is being 
used.

> I then posted a toot on Mastodon about myself having discovered the
> Falkon browser. Another Mastodon user answered to my toot telling me
> that the latest executable file of the MS Windows version of Falkon
> provided on https:// download.kde.org/Attic/falkon/ is quite old. So
> first I thought the Falkon project is "dead".

Here I have to say:
Developers shouldn't distribute their own software
https://drewdevault.com/2019/12/09/Developers-shouldnt-distribute.html

Packaging and supprting many distributions is a huge burden on the 
developers, especially when the developers do not use the requested 
distribution.

I am aware there is a Craft with unreleased Falkon recipe to build it on 
MS Windows, but noone tested it enough to make it move to stable.

https://community.kde.org/Craft
https://invent.kde.org/packaging/craft-blueprints-kde/-/blob/master/kde/
unreleased/falkon/falkon.py?ref_type=heads

(sorry from mangled invent url)

> But then I looked at the Gitlab site at
> https://invent.kde.org/network/falkon and found out that there are
> people currently working on the code of Falkon.

Yes, Falkon is still being developed, more like being maintained with 
some new features.

> So I cloned the latest Falkon code to my machine this morning, had to
> install an appr. extra 2 GB of Debian packages in order to be able to
> successfully run cmake to completely configure Falkons source code
> for compilation, compiled and then installed the Falkon code into my
> home directory.

The development is like that, a lot of dependencies and tools, each few 
years new tools will come and you need them all.

> Now I have Falkon in version 24.01.75 installed on my machine.
> 
> A little hint: In the Help menu > About Falkon, the "About Falkon"
> window still shows "© 2010 - 2018 David Rosca" - wouldn't it be time
> to give an update to this time stamp? ;-)
> 
> The version of Falkon that comes with Debian 12 ("Bookworm") from its
> repositories also has the time stamp "© 2010 - 2018 David Rosca".

Yes, the timestamp and the copyright was not updated.

> I think I could do some QA for the Falkon project, maybe also some
> translations into German, if necessary.

If you wish to help, you are welcome

> Regards,
> 
> Jens

Best regards,
Juraj