Last evening David Faure and me made some changes to the post commit hook. Normally commits can be followed via the kde-commits mailinglist. After our change it will also sent a mail to the committer if there is a problem with a commit.

As the project gets more contributors and more commits, the percentage of committers which are subscribed to the kde-commits mailinglist will decrease. No, I’m not the one who have done actual research into that, i’ll leave that to the experts, I just like random guesses. Anyhow, we felt that committers were more and more unaware of problems with their commits. I think someone (was it Cornelius?) pointed me to that issue at the last pim-meeting.

So, whenever you commit a file without a license, with an unknown license, with security issues, utf-problems or some syntax error, you will get a cc of your commit. Just make sure your e-mail address is up-to-date in kde-common/accounts. Also, it can lead to some duplicate messages if you are also subscribed to the commits via commitfilter.kde.org. Not much we can do about that.

I hope it’s another little improvement for people, so that they aware of a problem in their commit and that way improve overall quality of the files in svn.

The last couple of days I’ve been working on http://docs.kde.org.

It was needed because it was dated, the documentation that was available there came from old KDE branches. Also the scripts contained several errors which caused the documentation not to be generated due to missing entities and stuff. I also made the pdf creation work again and made sure the search works again.

All minor issues, the main point I wanted to make is that the site is now actively maintained again, this time by the sysadmin-group. So, if something is wrong, just file a bug when you want an extra module on the left or an important language is missing or you find dead links or whatever.

I’ve also re-added the site to svn, so you can make changes yourself too. Enjoy the updated site!

Today, the headlines in the dutch press especially nu.nl say that the internet in the trains is unsafe. It is possible to read mails people send and see what invoices get paid using online banks and they blame the dutch provider KPN.

There are so many things wrong with this piece that i’m annoyed by it. I hate journalists which just copy some press announcement, without verifying the facts at all or even make a simple call to some random specialist. Go home and don’t call yourself a journalist.

Every single bank in NL uses a https connection to communicate with the users, so it is simply not possible to eavesdrop the communication and see the actual invoices get paid. Eavesdropping on mail and MSN-conversations is not the responsibility of the provider of the internet connection. Their responsibility is to provide Internet, not build the security layer of the applications.

So, nu.nl, get your act together, fire the trainee who copied the press release and try to be real journalists. I see it a lot in news sites. It has no added value to copy press-releases. You can only be successful when you add value.

My blog rate has dropped significantly. That’s caused by the fact that microblogging is much more accessible. It’s short and to the point. So, the Midi (or Maxi?) blogs are now reserved for longer or more important blogs I guess.

I’ve a couple of points I want to Midi blog about, for example a view about PIM in the future, or how I hate that everyone tells everyone how bad 4.0.0 was. Maybe something I will do soon, although I better leave the second topic alone, better for my health I guess.

So, now back to subject. Matt Rogers has created a special sysadmin ‘product’ in bugzilla. Bugs reported against this will end up on sysadmins plate. This way we can quickly assign a certain sysadmin to the task or include other KDE contributors in the conversation. Also we have a quick and accurate view about pending issues, something that tends to get lost in a mailbox quickly.

The bugs are not public, due to the fact that sometimes passwords are in there or sysadmin internals, and we don’t want them to show up in regular bugzilla searches either.

So, if you have a request for sysadmin, like mailinglists, acls, kde email changes, or whatever, consider reporting a bug instead of writing a mail. The special page for it is at: https://bugs.kde.org/enter_sysadmin_request.cgi. This bypasses the regular questions about your distro, version, etc..

Thanks to Matt for working on this feature!