KDE & ARM (and introduction post to kde-core-devel)

[Michael Casadevall]

Hey kde-core-devel:
I figured with the advent of my new SVN account being created tonight,
I should drop a line to kde-core-devel, and announce my attentions to
the KDE developer community at large :-).

I'm Michael (IRC: NCommander), and I'm based in Rochester, NY. I run
KDE 4.2 on Kubuntu/amd64, and an active member of pkg-kde in Debian,
and Kubuntu packaging team.  I'm familiar with the Qt library, and
enjoy hacking code in my (very limited) free time, as well as keeping
both Debian and Ubuntu's ARM ports happy. As some people may (or may
not) be aware of, Qt does some special handling of qreal and other
variables on the ARM architecture which can cause a failure to build
from source (FTBFS) when downstream distributions attempt to build
these packages. My goal it to get these issues resolved upstream once,
and hopefully for all.

Although a few of you are familiar with me from my bug reports or
Debian/Ubuntu packaging groups, quite a few people aren't. I'm a
Kubuntu and Debian Developer who works on porting both these projects
to the ARM architecture, and has great interest in the possibility of
running KDE 4 on them. Very late last year/early this year, I ported
KDE 4.1 and later 4.2 in Kubuntu and Debian to armel, and then worked
on the task of pushing those patches up into KDE proper. As it stands
today, the KDE stack will build out of the box natively on ARM* (which
is a requirement for most distributions, and also helps people who
build KDE4.2 for embedded platforms like the Nokia N810).

My current short to medium sized goals include setting up an ARM
dashboard to allow people to easily check the build status of their
applications on armel, making sure that KDE 4.4 is fully ARM
compatible out of the box, and make a best effort on fixing any
outstanding FTBFSes in 4.3 as we're in hard freeze and I will not be
in a situation to setup dashboard and build the entire ARM stack until
the beginning of June (and quite possibly later due to real life
cirmstances).

My long term goal, hopefully also aimed at the 4.4 but will likely
extend into 4.5 cycle is to have all KDE apps building successfully on
ARM, from core to extragear, so that when distributions pick up the
packages, they will be ready to roll on all architectures without any
tweaking (I also have PowerPC, SPARC, and Itanium hardware which can
be used for builds), and setting up an ARM porting box for KDE
developers to use to help port their own applications.

I hope to postively contribute to upstream KDE developer, and to all,
a happy development cycle and a bright future on the ARM architecture.
Michael

* - PyQT4 still requires a patch which has yet to make its way
upstream, but none of the core KDE packages to my knowledge are broken
on ARM at the moment.

P.S. if the formatting on this email comes out screwy, please forgive
me, I'm having trouble w/ my mail client and thus sending via webmail.