Qt 4.7.0 beta 2 and Qt Creator 2.0.0 have been released upstream. There s some
noticeable changes in our Qt packages compared to Qt 4.6.x series:
- legacy Qt Assistant (ADP) is removed
- new Qt declarative module is introduced
- Qt Multimedia and Qt Webkit aren t being built anymore In case your package depends on the deprecated Qt Assistant, it is still being
shipped in a separated Qt Assistant compatibility package called
qt-assistant-compat. Qt Multimedia is now shipped from Qt Mobility API instead of Qt. The module has
been renamed to Qt Mobility MultimediaKit. Qt Mobility delivers a set of APIs
for mobile device functionality. Qt WebKit is shipped standalone, separated from Qt. Hopefully, it will make
Qt WebKit security support easier. There are also a new component in the family: Qt Messaging Framework (QMF).
The Qt Messaging Framework, QMF, consists of a C++ library and daemon server
process that can be used to build email clients, and more generally software
that interacts with email and mail servers. Finally, I have started to ship a snapshot of a new Phonon backend: Phonon VLC,
one backend to rule them all ! All the packages can be found in Debian Experimental repository, except
Qt Simulator, a simulator for Qt applications running on Nokia devices.
This package should land soon in Debian archives. I encourage you to try building your Qt applications against these packages and
please, report any bugs you encounter. Enjoy. http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qt4-x11.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qtcreator.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qt-assistant-compat.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qtmobility.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qtwebkit.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qmf.html
http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/phonon-backend-vlc.html
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=587759

Everything is in the title I have uploaded Qt 4.6.0 beta 1 packages to Debian experimental. Amd64 and i386 packages are built (unfortunately, alpha and s390 architectures failed to build).If you wonder if KDE 4.3.2 is working with these packages, the short answer is yes.

Since 2 months (7 weeks exactly), QtCreator is stuck in NEW queue Until NEW queue is fixed, you can find the packages on Alioth: http://alioth.debian.org/~fabo/ Bonus: kdevplatform is also waiting in NEW since ages, so on Alioth. Sorry dear users to provides packages this way. Note on architectures : only amd64 and i386.

Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina. This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs. Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads.

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• J r my Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matth i
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)

Ana started to spread the world with current discussions about which KDE in Lenny. Let’s relay on Debian/KDE universe: you can follow the discussion here and participate if you care about Debian STABLE and KDE. It is a hard decision and I gave my opinion. I think it is a good compromise between stability and bleeding edge stuff.

I don’t know if Peter tries KDE 4.1 beta1 (4.0.80) but I tend to disagree with some comments.

• you can’t configure size and appearance of the panel. This is a long-standing problem, but I thought it was fixed.

False. See the plasma icon on panel ? click on it and you’ll have what you want:

• In general, there don’t appear to be all that many configuration options available to replicate various behaviors that I have become accustomed to.

Could be nice to be more verbose.

• Rendering problems in the system tray; icons appear on top of each other.

True, but it’s better with each release and not really a showstopper.

• Various kicker widgets don’t appear to be available for KDE 4

Which one do you want ?

• Most applications don’t copy their old settings, but it appears that some do?

Indeed. KDE3 uses .kde as home directory and KDE4 uses .kde4. It is intended to not break your KDE3 until we test upgrade path.

• KMail doesn’t interact well with encrypted IMAP accounts. I didn’t try much beyond that, because I have no accounts that are not affected by that.
• Clicking on an RSS link in Konqueror doesn’t link to Akregator anymore. Probably, various MIME type associations are missing.

I don’t know I continue to use Kontact from KDE3. Modestas and Sune have switched to kde4pim and they found it better than expected.

• I couldn’t get the environment to remember to open terminal windows maximized. Very annoying.

Hmm It works for me. Konsole saves maximized/normal state.

• I couldn’t add any application icons to the panel. I’m not sure where on is supposed to store one’s favorites now.

Make sure you unlock widgets with plasma icon on the top-right corner. Drag and drop from K-Menu to panel. Sebas made a nice rough guide to plasma. Take a look !!!

• So when KDE 4 is actually usable, Debian will be ready. But not for lenny; that would be suicide in my opinion.

KDE4 is more than usable. It contains some glitches but we are far from sucide

So far, if you want to use KDE 4 under Debian, you need to install them from experimental. Under the ground, we prepared up-to-date packages from trunk (soon uploaded) and I took a snapshot of my current desktop: We didn’t know yet if Lenny will be shipped with KDE 4 but we hope it will be in good shape to have it. Everyday, improvements are done and the desktop is enough stable/solid to be used on a day to day basis. On other side, I reported a bug on plasma panel alignment isn’t saved and some hours later, Marco Martin (mart) fixed the issue \o/ Tips: if you want to have a transparent panel, you need to enable compositing.

Qt 4.4.0 rc1 was uploaded yesterday to unstable. It was previously available in experimental. A rework of the packages was done :

• Each Qt module has his own packages
• Webkit and XmlPatterns are shipped
• All sql drivers are provided as plugins
• Examples and demos are shipped built (previously shipped as compressed sources)
• Doxygen tagfile is generated/shipped

Qt4 is built on alpha, amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, s390 and sparc architectures. On other architectures, the build is in progress. It failed to build on mips/mipsel so far. And I confirm: Qt4.4.0 is a buildd killer. It needs 4x the time and double space: Automatic build of qt4-x11_4.4.0~rc1-2 on debian-31.osdl.marist.edu by sbuild/s390 98
[…]
> Build needed 04:19:38, 4733360k disk space vs. Automatic build of qt4-x11_4.3.4-2 on lxdebian.bfinv.de by sbuild/s390 98
[…]
Build needed 01:14:03, 2221884k disk space Enjoy !

Ian, you could have saved time by reading CDBS Documentation. Another useful variable is DEB_DH_INSTALL_ARGS.
DEB_DH_INSTALL_ARGS := --sourcedir=debian/tmp While I’m at some CDBS documentation sharing, to pass LDFLAGS using CDBS way:
DEB_CONFIGURE_SCRIPT_ENV += LDFLAGS="-Wl, --no-undefined -Wl,--as-needed" You can look at the online CDBS gallery website.

Wow, probably the news of the day for me. It’s done and not a joke: http://trolltech.com/28012008/28012008 What’s next now ? When you know Nokia and their consumer electronic product like the N810 uses maemo and mobile phones use Symbian, do they want to switch to Qtopia How KDE will be affected ? Everybody know the relations between Trolltech and KDE. Enough speculations, This is really exciting !

Trolltech has released Qt4.4.0 technical preview (tp1). This release introduces new features like phonon (multimedia framework) with the gstreamer plugin, webkit (web browser engine), xmlpatterns (XQuery and XPath engine), help system with QtClucene (Qt wrapper around clucene), etc … and some enhancements to current modules. It comes with new demos (browser using webkit, mediaplayer using phonon and embeddeddialogs) and new examples (help, ipc, phonon, qtconcurrent and xmlpatterns). It’s worth to take a look closer from a packager point of view:

• phonon can be found in KDE svn and webkit can be found on WebKit svn.

=> It means different release schedule and sources not always synced. It seems we need to choose which branch we want to package (TT/KDE and TT/WebKit).

• xmlpatterns module depends on exceptions support.

=> So far, we build Qt without exceptions support. If you want the xmlpatterns module, you need to enable exceptions support

• a change on Qt4.4.0 breaks ABI on mips architecture.

=> nobody is perfect… If you want to play with this release, you can find packages for Debian (sources and amd64 build at the moment) on: http://people.debian.org/~fabo/debian/qt4-x11_4.4.0~tp1-1/ the regular snaphot of the QWebView (done in 3s): As far as i can see, Qt4.4.0 will rock !

oh, we work too

Congratulations to Yves-Alexis Perez (Corsac), Nicolas Fran ois (Nekral) and Sune Vuorela (Pusling) too \o/ Finally, some accounts (~30 ?) were created and i’m in. Thanks to all people involved in Debian and Kubuntu. In particular (no order) my co-maintainers, sponsors, helpers and application manager:
* Pierre habouzit (Madcoder)
* Mark Purcell (msp)
* Ana Beatriz Guerrero (Ana)
* Enrico Zini (enrico)
* Gustavo Franco (stratus)
* Lo c Minier (lool)
* Jonathan Riddell (riddell)
* Sarah Hobbs (hobbsee)
* and many many others But I don’t forget other people who missed this train: Cyril Brulebois (kibi). Next time, it’s your turn ! (i hope soon).

Debian hasn’t adopted yet a default bootup splash utility and we need one to make it more sexy : it’s time to push Splashy
Splashy is a nice boot splashing system. It doesn’t need to patch the kernel and need a single configuration file in XML. Some users complaint about a missing GUI to make it easier to change stuff. here it is: QSplashy \o/ no fear GTK/Gnome people GSplashy exists too ! if you are interested to help to make Splashy, the next bootup splash utility for Debian (and others),
join us: http://splashy.alioth.debian.org/wiki/

Top posters in a few Debian-related Planets:

$ planet-scores.sh 
Planet Debian-FR :
     19 Rapha l Hertzog
      4 Roland Mas
      3 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      2 Gr gory Colpart
      2 Alexis Sukrieh

Sometimes I think this should be renamed Planet Buxy.

Planet Debian-FR (utilisateurs) :
     10 Julien Candelier
      8 Emilien Macchi
      4 Guilhem Bonnefille
      3 Shams Fantar
      1 Rapha l Hertzog
      1 Olivier Berger (perso)
      1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      1 Jean-Baptiste H tier (djib)
      1 Eric Veiras Galisson

Newly added contributors to that planet have all their recent articles aggregated, not only the ones they wrote since they were added.

Planet Debian :
     40 Christian Perrier
      2 Russell Coker
      2 Raphael Geissert
      1 Wouter Verhelst
      1 Steve Kemp
      1 Romain Francoise
      1 NOKUBI Takatsugu
      1 Michal  iha 
      1 John Goerzen
      1 Joey Schulze
      1 Gerfried Fuchs
      1 Fathi Boudra
      1 Enrico Zini
      1 Emanuele Rocca
      1 Dirk Eddelbuettel
      1 David Welton
      1 Christine Spang
      1 Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
      1 Adam Rosi-Kessel

Planet "Christian loves rugby".

debian-community.org :
      4 Holger Levsen
      3 Andrew Donnellan
      2 Evgeni Golov
      1 Wolfgang Lonien
      1 Rapha l Hertzog
      1 Martin Albisetti
      1 Marcos Marado
      1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      1 Cord Beermann
      1 Benjamin A'Lee
      1 Andreas Putzo
$

I know I have an encoding problem on some planets, but that script is a very basic curl+shell+sed+grep+recode+sort+uniq pipeline, and I only use it for the amusement value. Maybe I'll recode it with a proper RSS parser some day if I feel utterly bored.

This is the traditional Hello Planet \o/ For people who don’t know me, I’m a Debian Qt/KDE/KDE Extras/Desktop teams member,
trying to make our beloved distribution more sexy. After this *very* short introduction, time to go back to the real work,
and wait for the DAM to create my account (like around 26 other DAMnified people).

Writing good package descriptions Thanks to Fathi Boudra, I found the link to "Writing Debian package descriptions". Towards the bottom of the page, it contains an excellent checklist to follow when writing one. This entry is to take a note of it, so that I'll find it when I write one myself, and when I report a bug for a description that could be improved.