This is the first freeze in which I'm involved with upload rights. And it turned out to be a quite interesting ride so far, so I thought it would be nice to write about it.

Happy new year, Debian! To celebrate, here are some freshly posted, bits from the DPL for December 2012.

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Dear Project Members, happy new year! Here goes another report of DPL activities, this time for December 2012. This issue of the DPL-monthly is skinnier than usual: during the past month I've been struck by the catastrophe also known as "family holiday season", enjoying a solid 10 day break from computer-related activities. Talks

• I've been invited to talk about Debian and its opportunities in the field of education (for both students and teachers) at the fOSSa conference in Lille, France. Slides of the talk I delivered there are available.
• On related news, I've gladly accepted an invitation to talk at the next LibrePlanet conference in Boston, next March. It will be the occasion to discuss the status of collaboration with the FSF and the GNU Project. (FWIW, I'm trying to secure travel sponsorship with the conference organizers, but if that won't turn out to be possible I plan to go on Debian funds, as I consider this event important enough to do so.)

Assets

• The debian.eu saga is over! DNS is now under control of DSA, currently as a redirection to debian.org as for many other ccTLD, and we have now paid the corresponding transfer costs.
• The saga about the relicensing of www.d.o content, on the other hand, is still ongoing. But we made progress! Bradley Kuhn has kindly offered his experience to complete the relicensing part --- and most notably for dealing with contributions from people we haven't been able to contact. Due to busy-ness we will proceed further only in a few months, but in the meantime there is some work to do on our side, as documented in #388141.
• In conformance with the periodic hardware maintenance plan (the goal of which is, I remind you, having all Debian hardware under warranty) we have bought extended warranty for the storage array that serves project machines hosted at UBC ECE (~830 CAD). Thanks goes to Luca Filipozzi for taking care of the order part.
• As they did last year, Amazon kindly renewed their offer of AWS credit to be used for Debian related purposes, such as QA rebuilds. This year they offered us 8'000 USD of credit which, according to projections from last year usage, should be enough for QA rebuilds and buildd usage for events like BSP. Many thanks to Lucas Nussbaum and James Bromberger for reaching out to Amazon contacts and making this possible.

DPL helpers

• The experiment of sharing the load of DPL responsibilities within a larger team still ongoing. We held one more IRC meeting in December (and skipped one due to holiday season ). Logs are available at the usual place.
• Also, I've now started moving the DPL-related part of my own TODO list to the dpl-helpers.git repository. The idea is to further reduce SPOF and ease the transition to the next DPL. BTW: this is my last-3 report as DPL. If you haven't yet started encouraging project members you think could do a good job as DPL to apply, you should better hurry up!

Collaboration with the outer world

• I've signed the OSI affiliate membership agreement on behalf of Debian. This is just a long overdue formalization of the decision to join of a few months ago. The signed version is available in the DPL document archive on master.d.o, and it has been publicly discussed with other projects on the OSI affiliates mailing list.
• As requested, I've provided a quote for FSF's restricted boot campaign, that we have subscribed as a project a while ago.
• Thanks to the prod of various people (hi, Sune!), I've noticed an interesting call by the Italian government to representatives of FOSS communities, to form a group of experts that will have to decide the criteria to adopt in the public administration. The call is in Italian, but an article in English on the matter has been posted on the Joinup website of the European Commission. I've therefore submitted an application as Debian representative and, if accepted, I'll be happy to push for criteria that too often leaves high quality and well reputed community-based distributions out of the door for futile reasons (e.g. corporate "certifications").

That's all for last year, enjoy the new one, which will soon see a new Debian release out of the door. And to make it happen sooner, let's go back fix RC bugs! Cheers.

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PS the day-to-day activity log for December 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201212

So. for some reason, the danish tax authorities (Skat) has started requiring Adobe Acrobat for being able to see pdf files to work around a bug with handling of temporary files on Windows8 and shared computers and such. Luckily there is a couple of easy workarounds. Like modifying the Javascript to check things at runtime using some browser specific addons. Or just do it like I did and write a actual browserplugin. I cheated and used QtBrowserPlugin. Then my actual code was a couple of lines. Want to check it out? Look here: http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch%2Fsune%2Ffakeacrobat.git. It just does enough to ensure the test succeeds. Work in: iceweasel and arora. For some reason, it doesn t work in konqueror/webkit nor in konqueror/khtml.

So, a couple of days ago, I came home tired after a intense weekend of learning Akonadi and hacking on KDEPIM. At each meal, we attended 12 people, but it wasn t the same people every time. And a couple of people participated remotely. Several people, including me, got their feet wet in kdepim & akonadi code. Talks about the future with Qt 6 and Qt 7 and Akonadi 3 were also held in the corners. Hopefully, others will tell more closely about what they did, including fixing kmail memory usage to not grow until all headers of all emails was in memory and improving the address completion job to help filling in to/cc/bcc fields. Personally, I started off several times with the same issue. Not doing several synchronous calls from KMail to Akonadi during message writing and sending. On my way, I cleaned up some code and started over a couple of times. And the code is still a work in progress on my laptop. But the most important synchronous call is in that WIP patch now actually asynchronous \o/. There is still work to do on that area though and I hope to get around polishing it and finishing it this month somehow. I currently have function names like second_half_of_generateCryptoMessages and this_function_should_be_renamed . And next up will Andras Mantia hopefully blog about his accomplishments. And poke some other person for a blog post. Oh. and if you like developers taking a weekend or so out of their busy schedule to meet up for hacking, please consider supporting KDE by Joining the game

So, the other day, I wrote a blog post asking people to make sure their private hacks become published somehow. So in the sprit of that, I should also publish my recent hacks. I have been toying around as a web dude and created two nice pieces of oldschool webby software. So. Time to introductions: Dodoma is a simple online note taking application. I have created a boring homepage for it on http://sune.vuorela.dk/dodoma and I have a screenshot here:
Kadaka is a simple rss reader showing the five newest items from various rss feeds. Has special support for youtube channels.
I have created a boring homepage for it on http://sune.vuorela.dk/kadaka and I have a screenshot here:
Have fun with those two apps. Patches always welcome. Some of you might wonder where does he get those crazy names from . Well. One of them I found on a map. Thats actually a way I name quite many of my projects. Even those that don t even leave my harddrive. And the other one actually also is on a map, but I saw it on a frequently used bus in Tallin, Estonia. And. I am considering naming my next fancy projects after some of the cool words found on the join the game member page. If you want to be part of that, feel free to Join the game!

I m planning on taking the Tallink Silja boat from Stockholm to Tallin to get to (and from) Akademy. It is a all-night boat with restaurants, bars and almost whatever you would like. The boat leaves shortly before dinner and arrives shortly after breakfast and it is full of great fun. Last time (Akademy 2010 in Tampere), Inge, Ryan, Chani, Martin and me were on such a boat and it was a nice experience. Anyone up for such a experience this year ? You hopefully know how to reach me

In KDE e.V. (which is to KDE</kde> what SPI is to Debian, Jenkins and others) there is some times a need to vote. For example about accepting new members. Mostly about accepting new members. With the new vote system (ballot.kde.org), voters need to do a bit more to check their votes afterwards. basically

• Take username
• Your own secret
• The vote token

and sha256 it in the right order with the right separator chars and so on. All sha256 sums are published together with where the vote was, so voters can verify that they are counted correctly. After failing to construct a couple of times on the command line, I decided to write a small GUI app to help me instead. There it is. Nice. Simple. Effective. Sources available. http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch%2Fsune%2Fkrapyl.git&a=summary have fun, and remember to verify your votes.

In KDE e.V. (which is to KDE</kde> what SPI is to Debian, Jenkins and others) there is some times a need to vote. For example about accepting new members. Mostly about accepting new members. With the new vote system (ballot.kde.org), voters need to do a bit more to check their votes afterwards. basically

• Take username
• Your own secret
• The vote token

and sha256 it in the right order with the right separator chars and so on. All sha256 sums are published together with where the vote was, so voters can verify that they are counted correctly. After failing to construct a couple of times on the command line, I decided to write a small GUI app to help me instead. There it is. Nice. Simple. Effective. Sources available. http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch%2Fsune%2Fkrapyl.git&a=summary have fun, and remember to verify your votes.

So. Recently I blogged about Network status aware apps, and some time later, I got asked by a developer How do I see if I m online if I m not using network manager? and I replied with some dbus commands and he shook his head in despair. So, I ended up writing a small plasma widget targetting developers and very powerusers that can tell you the current state of the network and offers to add yet another manual datapoint to the network status. So. In line with another blog post of mine about getting the small utilities we all write and just let stay in a drawer (or somewhere in ~ on a local computer), I m announcing it s existance. That application became famous and even mentioned in Linux Weekly News, but I don t expect that here. But anyways, here it is: http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch/sune/networkstatus.git. And a picture of it, it is not pretty but well, it s a tool mostly for developers, not for end users. Have fun, and I hope to see more of these small projects from various people.

Today QApt was accepted into Debian's archives. It took me some time, in fact a lot more than I hoped it'd take, to get the final pieces into place [UPDATE](the inital work was done by Jos , the co-maintainer of QApt)[/UPDATE], but now you're able to use QApt as a simple-to-use wrapper around the whole APT, DPKG and Xapian stack. The target users are C++ programs using the Qt framework. The use cases range from graphical package manager to allowing easy updates of certain packages from within another program. My interest in QApt comes from me being co-maintainer of Kingston, the update notification Plasmoid for KDE. We have a wishlist bug open against Kingston, requesting the addition of a "do update" button. We could have used the update-manager infrastructure, but both Sune and myself weren't too thrilled with that. Luckily there is an alternative in the form of QApt. I'll hope I find some time during the next weeks to implement the update mechanism for Kingston. The next things to come for QApt will be minor cleanups, already waiting in Git, a new upstream bug fix release (no date is set yet) and a multiarchification (already partly done in a local branch).

This is both a release announcement for the next installment of The MirBSD Korn Shell, mksh R40b, and a follow-up to Sune s article about small tools of various degrees of usefulness. I hope I don t need to say too much about the first part; mksh(1) is packaged in a gazillion of operating environments (dear Planet readers, that of course includes Debian, which occasionally gets a development snapshot; I ll wait uploading R40c until that two month fixed gcc bug will finally find its way into the packages for armel and armhf. Ah, we re getting Arch Linux (after years) to include mksh now. (Probably because they couldn t stand the teasing that Arch Hurd included it one day after having been told about its existence, wondering why it built without needing patches on Hurd ) MSYS is a supposedly supported target now, people are working on WinAPI and DJGPP in their spare time, and Cygwin and Debian packagers have deprecated pdksh in favour of mksh (thanks!). So, everything looking well on that front. I ve started a collection of shell snippets some time ago, where most of those small things of mine ends up. Even stuff I write at work we re an Open Source company and can generally publish under (currently) AGPLv3 or (if extending existing code) that code s licence. I chose git as SCM in that FusionForge instance so that people would hopefully use it and contribute to it without fear, as it s hosted on my current money source s servers. (Can just clone it.) Feel free to register and ask for membership, to extend it (only if your shell-fu is up to the task, KNOPPIX-style scripts would be a bad style(9) example as the primary goal of the project is to give good examples to people who learn shell coding by looking at other peoples code). Maybe you like my editor, too? At OpenRheinRuhr, the Atari people sure liked it as it uses WordStar like key combinations, standardised across a lot of platforms and vendors (DR DOS Editor, Turbo Pascal, Borland C++ for Windows, ) ObPromise: a posting to raise the level of ferrophility on the Planet aggregators this wlog reaches (got pix)

Many of us out there writes small tools to just solve a simple task that you need. Here, I will present a tool I needed last night. I have a small job doing a wordpress site for some people, and I needed a image with the site title in a font matching some specific criteria (like a double story lowercase A and a small serif on lowercase L, while in general being a Sans Serif type). So what I needed was a application that let me write a word or a phrase, and see it written with all available fonts on the system. So, it took a little more than a effective hour and 120 lines of code to come up with this: Click to see image And if anyone cares, I have pushed the sources to git.kde.org. I m sure many of you also have various such small apps. Let s see them. That s also you Eike and your svgtoy app :) Another thing I learned from this app is that the ukij fonts targetted the Uyghyr language actually is very interesting also for western europeans.

I have mentioned it before in some blog posts that I m out looking for a job. In my job searching process, there is a couple of nice tools that I am missing. Maybe if I describe one of them, someone will say that it already exists over there -> or something. Tool 1. Tracking of data related to a job application.
For each such application I send I have a set of data, some pieces only for some applications:

• Contact data for company
• The open position I m applying for on the web
• The web form I submitted a application thru
• The email I used to submit my application
• Further emailing with the company
• Further chat logs (jabber or irc) with the company
• My jotting down during or after a (phone) interview
• Other data I ve gathered about the company

I would like one simple way of browsing all this information for a given position. Does this exist? preferably something that can interact with Konqueror, KMail, KAddressbook, KJots, Kopete and irssi on a remote machine. Tool 2: Tracking of tasks with states There is at least the following steps in a job searching process:

• Interesting company found
• Initial contact
• More information sent
• Phone interview
• First interview
• Second interview
• First draft contract
• Signed contract

A job application might go thru some or all of these steps or even more steps, and from each step it can end prematurely with a rejection . Here, I m missing a tool to track my applications and in which state they are currently in. My first thought here is a bug tracking system, but I m wondering if there is something nicer. Currently I m tracking it manually in a KJots notebook. Comments are open. And no, I haven t yet found a job.

Am I online or not? There is a summary at the end for the quick readers. It is in many modern applications important to be able to more or less gracefully handle if the application user is online or not. For example, there is no need to try to fetch emails if the device (computer, phone, tablet, laptop, ) doesn t have network (wifi, cable, umts, ip over avian carriers, ..). KDE has of course made nice functionality for this, and here I will try to describe how to make your app network status aware and what to be aware of in the process. Solid background All this is going on in Solid, using two parts of Solid and a bit of KDE s infrastructure:

• libsolid
• networkstatus KDED module

The networkstatus KDED module is trying it best to gather information from the computer to see if one is connected or not. It has the possibility to gather information from various sources, and handle changes and such. The as of writing available sources that the networkstatus module gathers information from is

• Network Manager
• wicd
• asking the linux kernel thru the abstraction layers ntrack and libnl
• connman might be work in progress

Collecting from different sources is important, because some people might have configurations like Manage wireless thru wicd , manage umts dongle with Network Manager and manage wired network with /etc/network/interfaces and all of it needs to be combined. Solid reports, if wicd thinks online , and network manager thinks offline that the user is Connected.. Solid States There is a enum with 5 values in Solid to describe the current state of the network:

enum Status
Unknown,
Unconnected,
Disconnecting,
Connecting,
Connected
;
Connected is the easy state. Here, Solid knows that you are having some kind of connection according to at least one of the sources. But it might just be a local network connection, and not actually a internet connection. So one here should handle connection failures gracefully. Unconnected is a similar easy state. Here, Solid knows that you don t have any internet connection according to the sources it knows about. One should here not try to do any networking. Connecting and Disconnecting is that a state change is happening, so that you can prepare to react on it. Solid also has the state of Unknown, used for cases where Solid doesn t have the required data to actually know it. A example could be a system without any of the data providers. You should here probably try to connect, and be able to handle failures gracefully. Also described as Proceed with caution . The bright reader might here notice that one both in the Unknown and Connected case actually should do the same. Querying for network status At any given time:

Solid::Networking::Status currentStatus = Solid::Networking::status();
if(currentStatus==Connected currentStatus==Unknown)
//try to do networking things
else
//mark application as offline.

Here, we first query Solid for current status, and then if the state is Connected OR Unknown, then we proceed. Getting notified Maybe you don t want the roundtrip of asking (resulting in a dbus rountrip each time) when you need to know the state changes. Then you of course can get notified. class MyNetworkAwareClass : public QObject
Q_OBJECT
public:
MyNetworkAwareClass();
void doNetworkActivity();
private Q_SLOTS:
void networkStatusChanged(Solid::Networking::Status newstatus);
private:
Solid::Networking::Status m_current_state
; MyNetworkAwareClass::MyNetworkAwareClass : m_current_state(Solid::Networking::Status())
connect(Solid::Networking::notifier(), SIGNAL(statusChanged(Solid::Networking::Status),this,SLOT(networkStatusChanged(Solid::Networking::Status)));

void MyNetworkAwareClass::networkStatusChanged(Solid::Networking::Status newstate)
m_current_state = newstate;
void MyNetworkAwareClass::doNetworkActivity()
if(m_current_state == Unknown m_current_state == Connected)
//try to do network activity


I guess this should be pretty self explaining. Summary

• Ask Solid::Networking::status() for network status
• Connect to statusChanged(Solid::Networking::Status) from Solid::Networking::Notifier to be aware of changes
• Treat the states Unknown and Connected the same way.

Oh. And I m out looking for a job.

John Layt recently blogged about his adventure with having children use Plasma Active with quite some success. The task I was this evening out at a board meeting in my local scout group, and for such a event you of course need the following

• Agenda
• Treasures report
• Minutes from last meeting
• Various other papers

I ve heard from various people that an iPad is great for such meetings, and produces much less paper waste, so of course, I wanted to try with my brand new Plasma Active tablet. Before meeting So before meeting: Charge tablet & fetch needed documents.
Possible issues: Everything was on a my imap server. Minutes was a plain text file, Agenda was a docx file, treasures report was a xls spreadsheet, and the various other papers were pdf files. For fetching, I ve heard a lot about Kontact Touch and everything using Akonadi. Besides me not being fully able to properly enter my password in the first 10 tries, and a sometimes flaky internet connection, everything here was a breeze. To the three first documents, the answer was Calligra Mobile . Rendered even the docx file better than libreoffice did. And Calligra Mobile was nice and touch friendly and worked pretty well for this. There is also something called Calligra Active , which is supposed to be way cooler, but still misses at least one essential feature to be used for a touchscreen only. It can only open documents passed to it on command line. And I m not yet very comfortable with a onscreen keyboard. For the last, there was Okular. The desktop edition of Okular. I was impressed by *how* usable Okular were for a touch screen device. A quick and dirty edition of a mobile Okular could probably be done with remove all toolbars and menubars and such and if no file is passed on command line, then open a file selector window and open selected file , which shouldn t take a person knowing the Okular code much time. But that s still just the Quick and dirty edition During And during the meeting, everything worked flawlessly, except the internet on site, so I was happy I had prepared in advance. As a extra bonus, Plasma Active offered the nice KDE Games, as John Layt also mentioned, for the parts of the meeting where it was a bit boring. So. At least for me and in this case, Plasma Active did its job, at least to a A. And it is still described as Alpha software. Issues There is, though, a few important usability issues: For QWidget based applications, oxygen s nice desktop feature of being able to move the application by dragging it from almost everywhere is just completely useless on a touch screen device when you are only using full screen applications. Luckily, oxygen-settings can disable this. Update: People tells me that this has already been fixed. The Network Manager Plasma Widget, in case of no network , is very hard to activate in order to select a network. A bit larger touch area here would be very nice. Currently, it feels like it is only slightly larger than a dot: . Future Oh boy, I m looking forward for Plasma Active getting to Beta or RC status. Or Final! And btw, I m looking for a job.

It s been a while since I last blogged, and some things has happened. Jobs
I m out looking for a job. Preferably KDE/Qt or Debian related. Or at least opensource related. Feel free to contact me if you know of anything. sune AT vuorela DOT dk Desktop Summit I ve been at Desktop Summit, awesome as usual to see all these great people, except monday morning. I think intel is partly to blame here :-).

• I got to a set of exciting talks, including one about a toaster.
• I got to meet some nice people, both old and new
• I hacked a bit on libprison
• I walked along the Berlin Wall, sat and enjoyed Brandenburger Tor and other parts of Berlin
• Learned to feel home in Berlin public transportation

Prison and such
The upcoming release of Prison will at least have a couple of new features, beside a couple of bugfixes:

• It is now possible to set the colors to be used for the barcodes. That s going to be nice in some cases.
• I have a patch in my mailbox adding EAN13-support from a brand new contributor. It just needs a bit of polishing and then ready to go

I ve also started to enjoy -Werror=unused-but-set-variable in GCC and killed some of those in KDE land. end There is more to come later, hopefully things about the ExoPC I gotborrowed at Desktop Summit, which is now running Plasma Active & Contour. Things about a new librison release, and maybe more places to use libprison. Oh. And yes, I m out looking for a job.

I ve gotten a couple of complaints on the amount of daemons that is launched by default by any app built upon the KDE Frameworks, so I investigated one of them a bit. The knotify daemon currently seems to do two things:

1. Keeping some dependencies out of KDE Framework libraries
2. Recieve messages from dbus, parse them, encode differently and send them on to other places over dbus

In the past, the knotify daemon was also responsible of showing popup-messages. So, I did a quick experiment here in Switzerland to try kill off that daemon and merged the code from the daemon into the KNotification part of kdeui. As a proof of concept it works, and if I can cut out some of the newly introduced dependencies it can end up being really nice. There is much less need for a separate daemon these days where knotify doesn t actually paint the popups itself, but rather passes them on to a galago-spec implementing part of the workspace (on linux) or to growl for various non-free platforms.

and it starts with f While looking at the future of the KDE Platform Frameworks here in Randa, Switzerland, a lot of interesting things has been found in kdelibs and kdepimlibs

• KSortableList
• KTypeList
• KAscii

that no one knew what was there for. On the good side, there is also lots of cool stuff, that of course most people knows about and uses

• A real nice job based api
• Nice library for figuring out when there is holidays and special dates in different countries
• IMAP library
• Compression library
• Hardware access library

And a lot of great larger solutions for solving different real life problems

• Akonadi
• KIO
• KParts

And lots of other cool stuff

• I really like the KDE plugin framework
• KIO slaves are great
• Kontact master is great
• Aaron is wearing pink
• Plasma Active seems cool
• The chefs are making good food, even though sometimes lacking a bit of meat

And we have currently nice things in the required runtime components for every app built using kdelibs

• Finger KIO slave
• Floppy KIO slave
• Weird cornercase user tools, some of them broken

Long time no blogging. Earlier, I wrote a blog post about transporting data to mobile phones. I have since then extracted the Data Matrix code I wrote there into a separate library, prison and added support for QR Code as well. So from KDE s next feature release, versioned 4.7 arriving around first of august, you have DataMatrix and QRCode support in Klipper. While on a barcode spree, I also added barcode support to the KDE Addressbooks for easy transfer of contacts. Also using libprison. Also available from 4.7 onwards. Few minutes ago, libprison 1.0 was tagged and hopefully soon, the KDE Sysadmins will publish my tarball. And about the weather. Some nice people wrote Debian Weather which in simple ways shows if it is unsafe to upgrade. Quite recently there have been thunderstorms and heavy rain in Debian Unstable. Perl rain.
I have recently added support for Debian Weather in the Plasma Dataengine for weather. Also available from 4.7 onwards. Last but not least, after spending a couple of hours on trying to understand Q3PtrList and how it was used in KHelpCenter, it is now, as the last component in KDE-Runtime, free of Qt3Support. All for now. Next up. Platform_11

Some days ago I upgraded my Sid system and when I restarted my X session the other day, I wasn't able to successfully login to KDE via kdm anymore. I'm getting some errors in ~/.xsession-errors:

kdeinit4: preparing to launch /usr/bin/knotify4
Connecting to deprecated signal QDBusConnectionInterface::serviceOwnerChanged(QString,QString,QString)knotify(16474) KNotify::event: 1 ref= 0
QMetaObject::invokeMethod: No such method KUniqueApplication::loadCommandLineOptionsForNewInstance()kdeinit4: preparing to launch /usr/bin/plasma-desktop
kded4: Fatal IO error: client killedkdeinit4: Fatal IO error: client killed
kdeinit4: sending SIGHUP to children.
klauncher: Exiting on signal 1

At the user/password prompt of kdm I can login, the KDE splash screen appears and then, suddenly, the connection fails and I'm back at the kdm login again. I tried to look for already existing bug reports, but KDE is quite large and with many programs. Are there any pointers for a bug report or even a solution/fix for the problem, dear LazyWeb? UPDATE 21:51:
Sune suggests in the comments that it might be a Xorg problem. I've attached a xorg.txt logfile to this post. As you can see, there's a backtrace because of a sig11 error. Funny enough, when I connect via remote X from my OSX I can login into KDE, although there are visual errors. Xorg is working fine on the local server with Gnome, though. So, for me it seems related to either KDE or maybe Compiz. UPDATE 2011-03-30:
Problem solved! LL hinted in the comments to reinstall the Nvidia driver and now it works again! Thanks! :-)