KDE Windows/Meetings/Osnabrück Meeting Summer 2012

The KDE Windows community will meet in Osnabrück on the weekend of 3.- 5. August The meeting will take place at the Intevation offices in Osnabrück.

For organization and to participate please check the Sprint Page

Proposed Topics

• Qt5 --> Andy?
• KDE frameworks --> Patrick?
• Packaging / NSIS / MSI how to integrate in emerge even better.
• "Autoupdates" for Standalone software like Kontact / Amarok / Calligra
• Sandboxing
• Oxygen or a more Native look as the default?
• Sandboxing
• Tests / Unittests (Maybe more of a "to hack" on topic, but It would be cool if we could make better use of them)
• Keyword system to tagging unstable software:

Gentoos emerge uses "accept keywords" to categorize versions of software into either stable, testing or experimental.

I'd like to propose a similar (but simpler) system for emerge on Windows: Add a "keyword" parameter to installation targets. If empty / not existant (current situation) that means "safe" (stable). Potentially unstable packages could then be tagged as potentially dangerous by giving them a certain keyword (like "~").

An emerge configuration option would be needed that defines the keywords that the user accepts (per default, that'd be empty - accepting all current targets but not those marked as unstable).

Developers that want to run bleeding edge software could just add the "~" keyword to the list of accepted ones and instantly move up to all the latest releases (which also makes sense as they might depend on each other).

This simple approach would not have any regressions or require a large initial "tagging" effort but would allow developers in the future to mark potentially dangerous targets leading to a nicer experience for e.g. app developers that "just want a stable base to start from".

• cross compiling (OBS)
• system integration
• kdewin-installer

Things to hack on

• Update mingw-w64 to gcc 4.7 as 4.6 is required by Qt 5
• Patch Mysql to build with mingw
• Removing Version numbers from filenames in emerge
• Let's build the frameworks?
• kdewin-app-installer
• Website

Notes from the Sprint

Portage Version

To avoid renaming and improve the "mergability" we want to remove the portage Version from the package names. We want to archive this by adding a new subinfo field to a package: portage_revision. This number should default to 0 and should be increased when changes are made to a portage file that affect the build results, similar to that of a package-revision on Linux.

We then also want to modify the following information fields to the the InstallDB (or the text file)

+ Target (the target used for the build)
+ portage_revsion ( the earlier mentioned portage_revision )
+ isDefault

And remove the current Version field.

This should allow us to handle rebuilding more intelligent

Patrick Spendrin will be working on that.

Sandboxing

To avoid conflicts beween seveal KDE Applications on the same system (e.g. Calligra / Kontact / Amarok) we need a mechanism to sandbox their environments without wrapper scripts and user interaction. To achieve this we want to have a global configuration file (kde.conf) that will contain the configuration that you usually set unter Linux with environment variables. Additionally to kdelibs (where we could patch this in readEnvPaths), this needs to be done in Akonadi and Soprano.

Look & Feel

We won't have common ground here, so better improve the documentation so it is easy to change for everybody.

Implicit Dependencies

We want to have that, so we decide to make it default for 4.9 and master

Qt5 / Frameworks

Andreas Holzammer gave a talk about the the Qt-Project and the workflow for contributing to Qt. We still can't build Qt5 with emerge even with msvc, we started on the general framework for building this but with mingw-w64 it's a longer way to go. With mingw-w64 there was an error that bootstrapping configure failed.

Patrick Spendrin talked about packaging Frameworks putting the Tier* libraries into single packages. With everything else in some kind of kde4-leftovers package. We have a Frameworks branch in emerge but there is also a frameworks target in emerge master. At the moment we can only build it with Qt4 and this is recommended currently to start working on Frameworks from a Windows perspective. Talking about daemons and which will go away. Making d-bus go away would be a good thing for Windows and Android with a different IPC mechanism, there is a kdelibs branch by boud that makes dbus optional but just cuts down a lot of features. Basically consensus was that we would like something like a libdbus-fat that offers different ipc mechanisms depending on the platform with the same interface but that would be a lot of work.

Packaging

We would like to have some update notifications, tomahawk uses qtsparkle we have to check that out. Calligra already has some manual mechanism coded into. But this would just mean downloading a new package and reinstalling it over the old version. Amaraok and Kdepim packages are in Emerge, we would always be happy to get new maintainers for more packages especially with sandboxing. The calligra packaging is available at: https://git.gitorious.org/calligra-installer-for-windows/c2winstaller.git