Onto KRASH! KDE 1.1.2 (Kolor) was announced
about a week ago. The reaction to this “beautify release” has been
quite positive and other projects are already considering adapting
the new high-colour icon sets, a tribute to the hard work done by
the KDE Artist Team. Meanwhile, Waldo Bastian did not lose any time
in initiating the
release process for KRASH, also known as KDE 1.89. As the
codename suggests, this release is targeted at developers and not
end-users.
The goals of KRASH are to stabilize development and to offer
developers a chance to familiarize themselves with the new Qt and
upcoming KDE 2. The plan is to feature-freeze kdelibs on October
15th with kdebase following on November 1st. The final
alpha-quality release is slated for December 1st. After the
release, everything will be unfrozen and the release process for
KDE 1.90 will begin.
The KOffice framework and family of applications are also to be
included in KRASH. Lotzi Boloni has decided to help with KChart
(formerly KDiagramm) and Montel Laurent has already been doing an
admirable job on KSpread; hackers are still however needed for
KFormula. Testers, documenters, and hackers in general are also
welcome.
CORBA news. There have been some significant
developments on the CORBA front. On the one hand, KDE 2 has
been ported to the new and improved MICO 2.3.0 but on the
other, several fundamental issues have been raised.
The
discussion ranged from dropping CORBA altogether — especially
after folks have been comparing applications like KSpread and
KIllustrator with and without CORBA support — to dropping the
multiple process architecture and instead switching to a shared
library approach for local CORBA components.
The actual tangible result of all this discussion is cuteidl
described as “an IDL compiler with marshalling code for the
QTL” and which has been progressing at a very fast rate thanks
in part to the amount of enthusiasm over it as well as the nicely
modular MICO code. The intent of cuteidl is to hide all or most of
the MICO/CORBA C++ bindings from the programmer and instead present
a nice clean API that takes better advantage of the Qt/KDE
framework and requires little or no knowledge of CORBA. As a
consequence, a lot of unwanted bloat has also been eliminated. It
is hoped that in combination with tinymico, and perhaps the shared
library approach, the CORBA situation will improve immensely.
This issue is sure to be brought up and further decided at
KDE-Two where about
50 core KDE developers the world over will be meeting.
KDE Chrome. Lots of updates (along with the
obligatory screenshots) are available on Mosfet’s site. Newly
implemented features include pixmapped borders, more customized
widgets and effects on user action, various updates and bugfixes.
It’s safe to say that Mosfet has brought theming to a whole new
level.
In other art news, “the artist currently known as
Torsten” Rahn has taken a 3 month break to work on his
diploma-thesis. He has gracefully passed the onus on to Rik Hemsley
who announced
a plan of attack for KDE 2. Covered are icons, backgrounds, themes,
and screensavers. In the latter case, he particularly emphasizes
that he does not want “animations of Konqui
the dragon flaming little terrified Gnomes”. Perhaps he’d
accept little nerds with glasses instead of the Gnomes. 🙂
Rik also made
available an extensive and illustrated tutorial on creating
KDE icons.
KDE User Interface Standards. Peter Penz has
set up a very nice site
in an attempt to promote KDE User Interface Standards. It’s been a
bit controversial on certain points such as the push
to eliminate one of the oh-so-useful pair, Close Window (Ctrl-W)
and Quit (Ctrl-Q), but everything is still open to discussion at
this point. Some of us Emacs users may never be satisfied by
certain keybindings but in the end they should be mostly
configurable.
KLPP update. Ivan E. Moore II, responsible for
the very prompt availability of KDE 1.1.2 debian packages, wrote in
with an
update on the KDE Linux
Packaging Project. There’s been some problems caused by the
huge amount of traffic generated by KDE users but thankfully people
have stepped in to help. Previous list subscribers will
unfortunately have to resubscribe.
KDE Quickies. Espen Sand
updated us on the progress of his DialogCore efforts and also
proposed a way of standardizing
window captions. Cesar Gutierrez Corea announced frontends for bind
and sendmail, dubbed KBIND (screenshots)
and KSendmail
(screenshots)
respectively. Samuel Kvasnica announced
SampLin,
a data acquisition package for Linux. It includes a graph widget
that may be useful
to other developers. Michael Goffioul announced a new development
snapshot of
the popular kruiser file manager.
Johannes Sixt announced
the imminent release of KDbg 1.0. Lotzi
Boloni announced a new
homepage for GOFAI-WMT.
LinuxWorld ran a very positive
review of KDevelop. Two
new sets of KDE slides are up, one set from Reginald Stadlbauer’s
KOffice
presentation at Linux Congress and the other set from Cristian
Tibirna’s talk at
Marche International du Multimedia (PNG support required in both
cases).
An archive for these reports is available. Une version
francaise pourrait eventuellement etre disponible ici.