With great proud and excitement I can now announce there will be a release party in The Netherlands. It will be held in Culemborg, which is located just below Utrecht, which is exactly in the center of NL.

If you have time on the Friday the 12th of February you should come. I will be there, but more importantly Jos will be there. There will be drinks and Jos will do one of his always impressive demo’s of this new version of KDE.

Developers, users and interested people are welcome, please put your name in the wiki at http://community.kde.org/Promo/ReleaseParties/4.4#Netherlands. That way we at least know how many people will come. If you want to do a presentation, you are more than welcome. Just drop in #kde-nl on freenode irc and talk to us!

If you are a mailman admin of any KDE mailing list, please consider turning off the monthly password reminders. Sending passwords in plain text is a bad idea to start with, doing it regularly without reason is even worse…

Login into the admin, go to the ‘General Options’, half way down there is a section ‘Notifications’, where the option is for the monthly password reminders.

It’s the default for new lists KDE sysadmin creates, but there are still a few mailing lists which have that bit set. If you need help, ping me on irc or file a sysadmin bugreport, the address is in the footer of bugs.kde.org.

As tokoe prefers screenshots in blogs, let’s start with one:

This is a screenshot of the current kdepimlibs build status on CDash. In the first column you can see the different build setups that have committed a build. There are builds from FreeBSD, SunOS, Linux, with different kind of CMake versions and differnt versions of GCC.

After that you can see the results of the different stages of the build: Update, Configure, Build and the Tests. The ‘Min’ column indicates how long that stage took. The most interesting column for me are the warnings in the build section. I’m trying to get that number down to the real warnings, removing all the non interesting warnings. On some line you can see 8 with -20 just below it. That means that in the last run the amount of warnings dropped from 28 to 20. Simalary you can see that there currently is a build error on one of the build machines…

CDash provides the possibility to subscribe to projects, with that subscription you can automatically receive build errors if you like to. You can also indicate that you only want to receive mail when your svn account is one of the possible causes of a build failure.

Contributing your build to the dashboard is easy. Just start your build as usual with cmake. Then instead of typing ‘make’, type ‘ctest -D Experimental’. It will build it and upload the data to CDash automatically.

So, next time your build fails and you need help on IRC, you might as well through your build on CDash and put the link to your build on IRC. Nightly builds are also important. It would be nice if we get as much as possibile different setups to report there. That would make releasing a KDE SC easy, as we can have detected build errors on certain platforms in a very early stage.

Summarized:

• Please contribute builds to dashboards
• Subscribe to build errors for your pet project
• Module maintainers should monitor their module
• If you have a minuted, fix some build warnings, it is fun!

This weekend a large part of the kdepim developers where present in Osnabruck for the annual meeting. Usually i like to drive to this meeting, but this year the weather forecast wasn’t to sunny, so I decided Friday morning to go by train. That prove to be a good decision, the snow fell down regularly and colliding with other cars or even worse is just not worth it. But I’m Drifting away from the subject…

Friday was the day everyone arrived, some came in during dinner time, so before that we could not start with any group wide activities. We did do some discussions about threading mails though. Stephen – proxy – Kelly is working on infrastructure (read: proxymodel) which makes threading manageable. That means the threading can be described in a certain matter, and it will be show in the view to the user. For example when you select two folders at the same time in KMail, the combined messages of those two folders are shown, and threading should merge messages from two folders in one thread, if they belong to the same thread.

The discussion we had was about how to store the threading information efficiently. You can imagen that you do not want to parse each and every message again and again to find out if it is a child of another message or a parent of another. Especially you don’t want that to do that when the user already requested the folder. You want to do that before the user clicks on it. And Akonadi provides that possibility.

Saturday the real kickoff happened with the announcement that KDAB and Intevation have secured sizeable funding, allowing them to to stabilize Akonadi and bring it into the mobile space. Which you can read as: the kdepim technologies will run on the Nokia N900, but also on a Windows Mobile device. It probably will be new pim applications, as those screens require a different gui. The past few years we have separated most of the technologies into separate frameworks, so this should be possible. That will also mean the frameworks should be present on no less than 5 different platforms: Linux, Windows, MacOS and the two new ones: Windows Mobile and Maemo. This is really exciting news.

After lunch we took the group picture. It was a delayed because a bunch of excited and energetic developers entered an area with fresh snow and a lot of room. It all started with a perfectly aimed snow ball, i’ll leave the rest to your imagination… If you see some white stains on the group photo, you know why now…

After that Patrick Ohly gave a presentation about his work on SyncEvolution. This desktop independent project aims to give a practical solution to the big syncing problem. People simply want to sync their phones with an address book or sync their address book within different computers. It uses the SyncML protocol to communicate. Sascha Peilicke already wrote an akonadi resource using SyncML, so this project could very well fit in there. Too bad Sasha could not make it. The big advantage in my opinion for choosing to work with SyncEvolution is that Patrick is employed by Intel to work on SyncEvolution full time, it means there are resources available and someone to talk to.

After his presentation we moved on to a discussion about the goals for 4.5. For KDE SC 4.4 ( next month) KAddressBook will be the first pim application which will use Akonadi. For many, many users it will be the first contact with an Akonadi based application. We assume that will give us a good shake down of this technology and its dependencies. KDE SC 4.5 (august 2010), will has as goal to have KMail, KOrganizer, KJots and probably also Akregator based on Akonadi and Nepomuk. Next week the work branch where all the porting is happening will be merged back to trunk and the guys working on achieving these goals will continue in trunk. Without doubt that will be rough in the beginning. You have been warned!

To conclude the afternoon we brainstormed about kdepim, the perception of the kdepim within KDE and the marketing we do, for example to assimilate new contributors within the team. We came up with a gazillion of ideas, we continued on Sunday with a really check of those items and setting out the big lines for the coming year. I won’t give the details about the great big plans we made, you will notice. We will be more visible than ever this year…

Then we went to the restaurant, which wasn’t equipped to handle such a group probably as it took ages before they delivered the food. It did help to try out exotic pineapple drinks though. After dinner I went back to the hotel to get some sleep.

Sunday morning started with the discussion of the Marketing meeting and after that Volker showed a demo of CDash. This system can be used to show the results of a compilation. It can show when a build is broken due to a commit. This is essential if you consider that some of us are developing for the 5 platforms mentioned above. It is impossible to check if your changes compile on all those platforms before you commit. CDash provides a solution for that, it will simply mail you if you broke the compilation on one of those platforms. To my surprise large parts of KDE are already present there. But breaking the build is not the only thing CDash does (it wouldn’t be sexy enough). It can also show which parts of your code base is covered by unit tests. That way you can see for example that certain parts of your code are not tested at all, for example an important else-branch. Or if your existing unit test actually cover what you think they cover. But there is more (this wasn’t sexy enough I guess): it also shows the execution time of each test, which in practice means that you get to see a graph which shows you the execution time of a certain over a certain period. That way you can catch important performance regressions in your code.

The final discussion was a brainstorm about GSOC ideas for kdepim for this year. I leave it for someone else to tell what came out of that discussion as I wasn’t present.

It was a nice and productive meeting, with a lot of discussions. There was almost no time to relax and do hacking, but that’s fine, that’s the goal of such a meeting, coordinating the important stuff and have snow ball fights. Big thanks to Intevation for hosting it and sponsoring the dinners together with KDAB. Very appreciated. Hope there will be a version 9 of this meeting.

Tuesday we lost Ramses Shaffy. A popular, charismatic dutch singer. He was popular when my parents were younger, so I was confronted with his songs while i grew up.

The lyrics were fascinating and mostly cryptic. for those that want a taste of dutch culture, here is a nice song, the title catches aspects of life and translates to: sing, fight, cry, pray, laugh, work and admire. The clip shows appropriate stills at each word.