[kde-embedded] KDE automotive: update

[Agustin Benito (toscalix)]

Dear colleagues,

it has been months since my last mail which does not mean there has been no
progress.

## Background

Let me first provide you with some background:

* During Akademy 2017, a group of KDE friends interested in expanding KDE
audience identified Automotive as a potential target.

* The first technical step to be taken is to fully support KDE Frameworks 5
in Yocto/Poky, the default distro nowadays to showcase automotive software.
Volker Kraus has been leading the effort to achieve this goal, together
with other developers.

* We also identified as a need to initiate contacts at a
representative/executive level to explore the best ways to showcase and get
attention in open automotive forums like AGL and GENIVI. We have taken the
initial steps but we have very little outcome so far.

* Once KF5 is supported in Yocto, the next step will be to explore how can
we showcase applications and Plasma.

## KF5 in Yocto: progress

This was the progress done in KDE Frameworks support in Yocto up to January
2018.

- The KF5 layer covers 71 (of 76) frameworks and is at version 5.42.0 <5420>
now. There are 10 pending patches and one major known issue
(cross-compilation support for kapckagetool5).
- KF5 updates work reasonably well, since 5.36 we got updates for every
KF5 release in a timely manner, thanks to automation, avoiding patches
and sufficiently generic file patterns in the recipes. Important to make
this effort sustainable.
- The Plasma layer covers 19 (of 44) modules so far and is now barely able
to show something vaguely resembling Plasma Mobile on Virgil/QEmu (haven't
tried real hardware yet), see attached screenshot.


  yocto-plasma-mobile.png
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwD5SNbUj32nZDM1LWJpZnc0NEZMWWlyNUw0bHJfTGdmX3dR/view?usp=drivesdk>


This has been proven quite useful for identifying runtime issues, missing
dependencies, etc in the KF5 layer.

## Other actions and plans

Next week Volker and myself will be at Embedded World in Nuremberg, 2018.
Volker will be mostly in the KDAB booth (Qt booth). I will not have a fixed
place where you can meet me so ping me if you are there.

Who else is attending?

Volker and I will take the opportunity to talk to AGL engineers at the AGL
booth and explain what we are doing.

Yesterday I talked to Paul Brown, hired by KDE eV to promote KDE, during a
KDE  gathering in Malaga, ES, about having KDE presence at ELCE[1] in
Edimburg later this year. This is a big joint event (ELCE + OSS Europe)
organised by the Linux Foundation in which we can show, among other
software, the progress we've done to support KF5 in Yocto. Yocto developers
and AGL/GENIVI developers usually attend too so it is the perfect forum to
showcase our progress to a wider, still FLOSS oriented, audience.

If there is progress beyond KF5 (like Plasma), AGL AMM Europe could be
another great opportunity to show where we are at to open Source/automotive
focused audience.

Best Regards

Agustin Benito Bethencourt (@toscalix)
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