So Aaron had a post up about building a community. A couple of the major points he is driving is to make it easy to work on the code, and to make it easy to contribute. In accordance with those principles I have been continuing to work on kdesvn-build as I feel that being able to quickly get into a working KDE development environment can open code review and contribution substantially.
Dominik Haumann also mentioned kdesvn-build and wondered why it is not more prominent in the KDE TechBase build instructions. I’ve not done it because a) I want to avoid “tooting my own horn” so to speak and b) the ever-insidious lack of time. I (obviously) think kdesvn-build is a swell way to setup and maintain your development KDE environment so if people would like I can try and post up instructions on the TechBase.
As far as kdesvn-build goes, I’ve fixed a bug (bug 172719) preventing successful builds of a module if you had more than one option in your cmake-options for that module. In addition I’ve extended support for KDE Subversion module snapshots to modules from extragear and playground, which will help for initial checkout speed.
I’ve changed the handling of the “tag”, “branch”, and “module-base-path” options. They used to automatically add the module name to the end of the generated URL before checking out the module. This was because the way we had Subversion branches and such setup initially always seemed to have an extra module name in the path, at least for most modules. Now that is not the case, so although it is an incompatible change it is time to move on with the times. (I have added a warning for this specific change if kdesvn-build thinks you may be affected by it so you should not be caught unawares I hope). I’ve also been working on finally adding a test suite for kdesvn-build since there are so many features now that I need a way of making sure I don’t break the software by accident from a seemingly minor change.
I haven’t forgotten about JuK either although I’ve not been able to accomplish anything close to what I’d like. For KDE 4.3 the track announcement popup will use XCOMPOSITE extension if available for true transparency. In addition I will at some point make the crossfading optional since it’s kind of a love-it or hate-it thing for many people. I’ve added some more errors checks although I don’t know of any specific bugs that they will fix offhand.
As far as the soon-to-be-released KDE 4.2, I managed to add a new KDE screensaver (the KDE Asciiquarium that I’ve mentioned before). In addition I’ve added a kioslave for Perl documentation and made the man kioslave output more presentable. For KDE 4.3 I would like to condense the stylesheets and such split between the various documentation viewer kioslaves into a common set but we’ll see if I get time. It would make a good junior job I think though if anyone is interested. ;) Also the info kioslave still needs to get transitioned over.
Hopefully that won’t be the extent of my contribution to 4.3 (other than the normal assorted bugfixing) but we’ll see, it just depends on the extra time I get (and that keeps going down as the little one keeps getting older ;).