2009 introspective

Hi...

I'm putting together a "where are we now, where are we going" snapshot of as
many of the "big pieces" in KDE 4 as possible, and I'd like some input from
you on Dolphin and Konqueror.

In particular, what I'm looking for are 2-4 bullet items for each of these two
questions:

* What have been the defining achievements in the last year?

* What are the main focus points and or goals for the project in 2009?


If you're feeling extra helpful, you might want to also provide some input on:

* What are the major pain points in your project right now?

* Outside of the core libs (kdecore, kdeui, kio, kfile) what are the most
critical pieces of KDE technologies that your project is relying on?


You can reply to me directly; I'll be collating and making public the results
when they are in ...

As an example of what I'm looking for, here's the answer set of Plasma:

In the last year:

        * Parity with KDE3 desktop/panels
        * Finished out the foundational pieces (extenders, activities, scripting..)
        * Moved libplasma to kdelibs

Focus points in 2009:

        * Ease of creating Plasma components (Plasmate)
        * Netbook interface
        * Media center components
        * Remote plasmoids
        * Social desktop features
        * Improved integration with Nepomuk and rest of workspace

Major point points:

        * x.org driver quality
        * QGraphicsView is still going through growing pains
        * newness of our own codebase resulting in larger #s of defects

Major technologies we rely (or will be relying) on:

        * x.org and kwin compositing features
        * QGraphicsView
        * Solid
        * Nepomuk



As for why I'm doing this survey, here's an excerpt from
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/04/trailheads.html:

"The pre-4.0 development of KDE was helped along by everyone knowing what we
were striving towards: we had the Pillars, these new big chunks of technology
we were busy slotting into place so that we could build ever better
applications on top of; we had a renewed focus on clean, usable interfaces; we
were also aiming for beauty and greater platform independence.

The individual projects around the KDE universe all swirled around these
shared goals. Each headed in their own direction that reflected their own
interpretation of these goals as weighted by their development team in terms
of importance. Not remarkably, while there was variance in execution, there
was a remarkable harmony in the overall approach and results.

That didn't happen by accident: it happened because we were communicating with
each other about our goals and in-the-moment situations. I was part of only a
fraction of these conversations, but I remember the huge number of informal
meet ups both online and in person (part of my "coffee shop meetings around
the world" tour, or at least that's sometimes how it felt ;). It was inspiring
and helpful and marked a high water point in KDE community togetherness for
me.

We're into 2009 now and it's time to stoke those fires again."

Thanks for your time and energy in advance :)

--
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

Hi,

Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> Hi...
>
> I'm putting together a "where are we now, where are we going" snapshot of
> as many of the "big pieces" in KDE 4 as possible, and I'd like some input
> from you on Dolphin and Konqueror.

I'll try to give an overview from a Dolphin and Dolphin KPart point of view:

> What have been the defining achievements in the last year?

* Improved parity of the Dolphin KPart with the functionality
  offered in KDE3 Konqueror.
* Performance improvements (previews, ...)
* Basic integration of Nepomuk to show meta data.

> What are the main focus points and or goals for the project in 2009?

* Parity of the Dolphin KPart with the functionality
  offered in KDE3 Konqueror (partly improved for KDE 4.3 already).
 
* Improved search support by using Nepomuk (partly done for KDE 4.3 already).

* Improved management of meta data (-> Nepomuk coding sprint in June).
 
* Generic source control support (CVS, SVN, Git). Currently it is only
  possible to add service menus, but the current state of files is not
  reflected by the icons. Planned for KDE 4.4.

> What are the major pain points in your project right now?

* No real pain points there. Generally the progress is slower than
  I'd like to have it due to my limited time I can spend with Dolphin.

> Outside of the core libs (kdecore, kdeui, kio, kfile) what are the most
> critical pieces of KDE technologies that your project is relying on?

* Nepomuk
* libkonq

I hope this information is sufficient, otherwise please don't hesitate to contact me directly.

Thanks!
Peter

[...]

[Robert Knight-3]

> I'm putting together a "where are we now, where are we going" snapshot of as
> many of the "big pieces" in KDE 4 as possible

Apologies if you answered this already and I missed it - Is this
intended to be only about the libraries that make up KDE or a general
picture of where KDE as a desktop is and where it is going?
Is this something you will be pitching at developers or users?

Great though our code might be, I do think that when asked about
achievements and goals the answer is too much about the code
and 'shiny stuff under the bonnet for developers' and not enough about
what the user can see and will see.  One thing I will say

Regards,
Robert.

2009/5/5 Peter Penz <peter.penz@...>:

> Hi,
>
> Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
>> Hi...
>>
>> I'm putting together a "where are we now, where are we going" snapshot of
>> as many of the "big pieces" in KDE 4 as possible, and I'd like some input
>> from you on Dolphin and Konqueror.
>
> I'll try to give an overview from a Dolphin and Dolphin KPart point of view:
>
>> What have been the defining achievements in the last year?
>
> * Improved parity of the Dolphin KPart with the functionality
>  offered in KDE3 Konqueror.
> * Performance improvements (previews, ...)
> * Basic integration of Nepomuk to show meta data.
>
>> What are the main focus points and or goals for the project in 2009?
>
> * Parity of the Dolphin KPart with the functionality
>  offered in KDE3 Konqueror (partly improved for KDE 4.3 already).
>
> * Improved search support by using Nepomuk (partly done for KDE 4.3 already).
>
> * Improved management of meta data (-> Nepomuk coding sprint in June).
>
> * Generic source control support (CVS, SVN, Git). Currently it is only
>  possible to add service menus, but the current state of files is not
>  reflected by the icons. Planned for KDE 4.4.
>
>> What are the major pain points in your project right now?
>
> * No real pain points there. Generally the progress is slower than
>  I'd like to have it due to my limited time I can spend with Dolphin.
>
>> Outside of the core libs (kdecore, kdeui, kio, kfile) what are the most
>> critical pieces of KDE technologies that your project is relying on?
>
> * Nepomuk
> * libkonq
>
> I hope this information is sufficient, otherwise please don't hesitate to contact me directly.
>
> Thanks!
> Peter
>
> [...]
>

On Wednesday 06 May 2009, Robert Knight wrote:
> > I'm putting together a "where are we now, where are we going" snapshot of
> > as many of the "big pieces" in KDE 4 as possible
>
> Apologies if you answered this already and I missed it - Is this
> intended to be only about the libraries that make up KDE or a general
> picture of where KDE as a desktop is and where it is going?

libraries, applications, desktop shell, .. the whole thing.

> Is this something you will be pitching at developers or users?

it's for "us" the developers; the idea is to increase the visibility of what
each of us are doing while also getting people to think a bit about what they
are doing in the process.

which is why i am using the term "introspective"

> Great though our code might be, I do think that when asked about
> achievements and goals the answer is too much about the code
> and 'shiny stuff under the bonnet for developers' and not enough about
> what the user can see and will see.

i agree; this is a different topic altogether however.

--
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

[Maksim Orlovich-2]

> Hi...
>
> I'm putting together a "where are we now, where are we going" snapshot of
> as
> many of the "big pieces" in KDE 4 as possible, and I'd like some input
> from
> you on Dolphin and Konqueror.
>
> In particular, what I'm looking for are 2-4 bullet items for each of these
> two
> questions:
>
> * What have been the defining achievements in the last year?

Note: please consider this a draft of sort --- I couldn't catch people I
wanted to review this, but I also don't want to keep you hanging.
>

For KHTML, and KJS, it would be rather hard to summarize it this short
accurately (I went through changelogs, and it came out as about a screen
worth of bullets), so let's see if I can make some -really- long bullets.

* New web APIs supported: CSS3 web fonts, CSS3 media queries, various
properties from a mixture of CSS3 modules, some fragments of HTML5, some
fragments of DOM3, etc.
* Performance, performance, performance: bytecode engine and other
optimizations in KJS. Significant CSS matching improvements. Significant
text wrapping optimizations. Lots of painting optimizations. Various
prefetching and preemption techniques to improve responsiveness.
* Lots and lots of compatibility and standard compliance bugfixes.
* And, foundations of important stuff: editing & SVG. Both are rather...
spartan in their functionality at the moment, but they're something to
build on.


> * What are the main focus points and or goals for the project in 2009?

Well, I think a big chunk will be building on the "foundations" listed
above --- especially with the GSoC project and editing. Beyond that, I
think our development tends to focus on attacking many angles
incrementally at once, and being responsive to the bug report traffic.