RKWard is in kdereview - again

Sat Mar 26 20:34:06 GMT 2022

Hi!

KDE.org has been our home for a 7.5(!) years, now (after over a
decade on sourceforge), but we still haven't left playground... After a
lot of procrastination on that matter, a previous review failed due to
lack of time on my part. Sorry! Now, finally, I'd like to ask you to
start reviewing RKWard for inclusion into exragear / education, once
more.

RKWard is an easy to use and easily extensible IDE/GUI for R (a
powerful language and environment for statistical computing, if you
did not know it, yet). It aims to combine the power of the
R-language with the ease of use of commercial statistics tools.

RKWard is used productively on Linux/BSD, Mac, and Windows.

Here's a summary of the critical comments we got in the previous round
of review (https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=153883367600690&w=2):

Albert Astals Cid remarked
(https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=153912336114603&w=2):

> the i18n folder seems like from the past and something you should not
> need if in kde infrastructure. Could you delete it?

We cannot easily get rid of this, entirely, as we are shipping
(non-compiled) plugins that keep their message catalogs in relative
paths, and thus we have to install .mo files to custom locations. Pino
Toscano has helped to bring this more in line with standard KDE.org
processes (https://invent.kde.org/education/rkward/-/merge_requests/2).

> Also I'd suggest you compile enabling
> -DECM_ENABLE_SANITIZERS="address;undefined"

Thanks for the hint, did not know that switch. One effect of this is a
lot of false positive "runtime errors", when casting a half-destroyed
QObject* to its original (derived) type, in order to remove it from
containers (e.g. a QHash of KActionCollection()s). Is there an elegant
way around this?

> There's a few memory leaks (reported at exit) that you may want to
> have a look.

I fixed a lot of that, but didn't work out all of them.

> And there's also a few undefined behaviour warnings on exit, you've
> them marked as "known" things but it'd be good if you could find a way
> to fix them.

Not quite sure what you were referring to, esp. what I may have marked
as known behavior. I did fix several quirks at exit since this comment
(and I keep introducing new ones, all the time).

> Your help menu is for some reason missing the Change Language option,
> i tried to do it a quick fix but could not, i would appreciate if you
> could find a way to only define the extra actions and not all of them
> (like we do for example in okular).

I've added the switch application language option (in Settings rather
than Help). Our help menu is perhaps more customized than meets the eye
on first glance. For instance, we have an app-integrated help system
instead of external handbook (at least as the primary documentation),
and our bug report dialog is beefed up to include a lot of extra
information by default (mostly importantly: version of R). I guess it
would be possible to hack KHelpMenu this way, but at least at some
point in the past it seemed cleaner to implement "from scratch" (but
using the default actions, where applicable).

Comments by Jonathan Riddel
(https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=153916691226377&w=2):

> It installs two desktop files which creates duplicate menu entries
> /usr/share/applications/org.kde.rkward-open.desktop
> /usr/share/applications/org.kde.rkward.desktop

Completed following suggestions by Thomas Baumgart and Meik Michalke:
https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=153942961310071&w=2

> The .desktop files call it a "GUI for R" which is not a great
> description, everything in the menu is a GUI.  I recommend "R
> Statistical Programming" or "IDE for R" maybe.

Renamed to Statistics with R, following Meik's suggestion
(https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=153942595709279&w=2).

> I tidied up the files with the icon licence as they could easily be
> lost.

Done by Jonathan.

> It depends on WebKit which is not supported, could this be ported to
> WebEngine?

Meanwhile, RKWard can be compiled to use QtWebEngine (and this is the
default), but support for webkit has not been dropped, because MinGW is
an important platform for us.

> It's uncommon having debian/ packaging directly in the source and
> there's also debian-official/ which could get confusing and
> out-of-sync and messy.  I recommend moving them to another archive.
> Storing the packaging in KDE neon Git would be cool as we already
> have packaging for all the rest of KDE software.

Meanwhile packaging has been taken over by the debian-qt-kde team
(thank you so much!). Jonathan himself added RKWard to neon. We still
have a (basic) debian packaging to support nightly builds in our Ubuntu
PPAs (which fill a somewhat different gap than Neon), but this is now
kept in a separate repository.

Jonathan commented in a separate mail
(https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=154118912915065&w=2)

> There's no appstream metainfo file nor product-screenshot
> https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/AppStream

Done: Contributed by Meik and Yuri

Thanks to all for your feedback last time (I left out feedback that did
no criticize anything, but I hope I have not left out anything
substantial in my summary)!

Looking forward to your comments.

Thomas
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