Updates
RSIBreak
I got some reports that the settings dialog was broken. When I checked SVN it was already fixed, so I just needed to make a new release. Will Stephenson gave the finishing touch and after that I used the createtarballs script to generate a new tarball. The only thing which stands in the way of making a release candidate is the fact that the plasma applet is currently broken. a new contributor started to work on the applet, but seems to have disapeared. So if there is someone out there with plasma knowledge, please make the rsibreak applet behave, the engine is there, the rsibreak code is nice, just requires an hour hacking. ;-)
I even updated the site together with a co-worker. She did the layout, i updated the content.
The official state of rsibreak is kind of weird, officially I’ve given up on it, not because i don’t like the app or don’t need it anymore, it is just that i’ve too little time. But it completely works, so I keep maintaining it in maintenance mode until a new eager hacker stands up and wants to take over.
Mailody
Last week I returned in hacking mode for a while. I seriously want to start using Mailody4 rather soon now. So in the private hacking weekend i had, i started to simply fix each and every bug i hit. After two days it finally got somewhere. At the end of this month there will be a Akonadi hacking weekend. I hope we find time there to squash another set of bugs on the Akonadi side, so I can use Mailody4 full time after that. Akonadi has seen a lot of progress lately. Stabalisation fixes and error handling is improved…
Release-team
The release team is kind of working allright. Now and then you simply hit the fact that it is not always easy to make decisions while you are in a group. When one person proposes something and ten people reply, it often results in some kind of deadlock which has to be resolved. In this case David Faure stepped up and pulled the tags-for-kdesupport into reality. It’s great that someone steps up and does that. Though I’m not completely sure this happens all the time, some kind of a ‘leader’ could make things easier, but we’re not a company, so that does not exists. Not that it is not possible when you are not a company, it’s just that it is not natural. Ah well, you get what I mean.
Community Working group
Another project I wish I could spend time on. Jucato already explained a lot about userbase, and I’m happy to see the other members of the CWG getting this of the ground. It seems to gain momentum. I think it is awesome that there is a techbase for users. It can serve as first stop for users to see if their problem is covered in a FAQ already.
Thank you for continuing to maintain rsibreak even when your time is limited. It is much appreciated. (This is the perfect place for a story about how it saved my life or something, but I’ve never been in such a position. So instead of some amazing story of how rsibreak is a miracle I guess i just have to repeat…) Thanks! I don’t know when I discovered it but I’ve been using it ever since. You rock.
Just to chime in on what Tom says about RSIBreak: prior to updating the package for openSUSE 11.1, we noticed that some config dialog layouts had broken in the port to KDE4. I was able to fix those in 10 minutes without having seen the code before. Then I gave it a run in Valgrind to make sure there wasn’t anything horrible going on – there were no errors or warnings in RSIBreak code. So if you are thinking of stepping in to help with RSIBreak, the codebase is small, is very easy to understand and is very clean. Props to Tom for writing it that way, it makes an excellent introduction to KDE. One Junior Job that would be a good skills-building exercise is porting the config dialogs to KConfig XT.