Bloggy

So 2009 is expiring where I live.

The year was shaping up extravagantly 12 months ago. We were expecting our second baby soon. My ship had just come off a spectacular (for SSBNs) patrol, and had won the squadron Battle “E” and even the Omaha Trophy. I was due to rotate to a nice shore duty soon.

In my volunteer efforts, KDE 4.2 was shaping up to be a fantastic release of the KDE Plasma Desktop and associated platform software. I was even going to get to visit my family in the upcoming 2009 summer and reconnect with a lot of people I hadn’t had a chance to see in awhile.

As it stands though, 2009 has been a massive heartbreak. Good riddance to a horrible year. Here’s hoping 2010 can’t get any worse.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Personal | 2 Comments »

kdesvn-build 1.11 has been released. (Update 2009-12-26: Fixed broken link, thanks deabru)

Changelog is basically this:

1. Documentation is improved.
2. The script itself is less craptacular.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, etc. etc. I’ll be on duty tomorrow :-(

Posted by mpyne under Personal | 2 Comments »

Maintaining the documentation for a project is a necessary, but often thankless task.

I’ve been going over the kdesvn-build documentation recently since there were several major changes to kdesvn-build in version 1.10 which I didn’t bother to document.

I’d only scratched the surface of the changes when I got fed up with the output that you get by default with our documentation generators (which is not meant as offense, just the way it is).

So, I took a detour and tried to duplicate my output-finessing feats that I had earlier performed on kio_man, kio_info, and kio_perldoc.

To see what I’m talking about first, consider the following:

• Open up KHelpCenter and look at one of the installed documentation pages. (The specific one doesn’t matter, I’m just referring to styling).
• Now look at the output of running meinproc4 with the kde-web.xsl XSLT stylesheet. (meinproc4 is the tool that KDE uses to convert the DocBook XML source to the output HTML). The kde-chunk-online.xsl output is similar. Remember that logo? :)
• The docs.kde.org output is looking a bit better, but still out of date.
• Finally, the kdesvn-build website has my current results at this time.

Now I am neither an artist nor a web designer but I do think that the output is starting to look better. (The content itself is still mostly out of date but I’ve at least updated the command line options and configuration options tables).

So now my question is, is this something I should work on trying to integrate back (at least for KHelpCenter stylesheets, since that output looks broken to me in the header)? I think our “spit and polish” on our user-interfacing documentation could go a lot way toward making the documentation more pleasant to use. And better yet we are outputting specifically for one of the most advanced HTML engines in the world so there’s no reason for us not to use every useful feature if it makes the output nicer, no?

Oh, I changed the git checkout/update procedure a week or so ago in trunk, if you’re not testing it I would appreciate it if you could test so I can do the next release this upcoming week without me being the only one to use it. ;)

Posted by mpyne under KDE & kdesvn-build | 2 Comments »

I don’t normally post about noteworthy disasters in diaper changing because, well, duh. Babies and toddlers in diapers will result in messes.

But this last one was so bad that it nearly should have resulted in news coverage, a Federal disaster area being declared, cleanup crews in the HAZMAT suits, etc. YUCK.

Token KDE reference for pk.o: I’m working on improving kdesvn-build docs, more on that later.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Personal | No Comments »

So I woke up this morning to notice that my kdesvn-build --refresh-build run from last night had a hiccup somewhere:

The problem was kdelibs failed to install, which meant every subsequent module error-ed out during the CMake process. The problem with kdelibs was related to me having an old library installed in my Qt directory since I hadn’t cleared out my Qt/KDE installation directories first (whoops).

It would be really annoying to have to type out each module to build just to skip the first four that had built right. Luckily I don’t have to do that, instead this sufficed:

$ kdesvn-build --no-src --resume-from kdepimlibs
Script started processing at Sat Dec 12 19:04:24 2009
< <<  Build Process  >>>
Building kdepimlibs (1/21)
        Preparing build system for kdepimlibs.
        Removing files in build directory for kdepimlibs
        ...

The magic here is the --resume-from command line option which skips until the given module in the build process. --no-src is only available since kdesvn-build-1.10, use --no-svn if you haven’t upgraded yet.

Posted by mpyne under Computing Troubles & KDE & Useful Tricks & kdesvn-build | 1 Comment »

So our brothers/sisters at the GNOME Project managed to hit the front page of Slashdot.

There’s a lot one could say about the topic, but I’ll just leave it at this: I think it’s ironic that a project started essentially entirely due to the non-Free nature of Qt (at that time) would decide to separate from the Free Software Foundation and GNU based on Richard Stallman’s disapproval of proprietary software. I guess the times, they are a-changin’.

Posted by mpyne under Personal & Political | 16 Comments »

Now Konversation has also switched to git.

Peter mentioned it being unfortunate that there was not a way to build Subversion and git modules with the same tool. Except that there is, and has been since October (and even before in the summer if you like unreleased code). kdesvn-build. Yes, I know I still need to rename it, I’ll get to that eventually ;)

Anyways, here’s what I added to my existing kdesvn-buildrc to build konversation:

module konversation
    repository git://gitorious.org/konversation/konversation.git
    branch master
end module

Now one catch is that scripts (including Michael Jansen’s build tool, last I’d heard) seem to have less success running git than doing so at the command line :-(. If you do end up manually cloning the git repository then make sure you’re using the trunk version of kdesvn-build to avoid git errors later.

One possible workaround is to use the HTTP protocol for the repository instead of the git:// version, but that’s less efficient so I’d really prefer to find a way to make git always work from scripts instead.

Anyways, congrats to the Konversation developers on continuing to blaze the git trail for KDE.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & kdesvn-build | 4 Comments »