dissections

I'm sitting in the games room where the fußball tournament, which has replaced the trip to Zermatt which was canceled due to weather, is in full swing. Eight teams vying for the win, with laughter all around. Still, four people in the room here are hacking while most of the attendees remain scattered about in the rooms in the three floors above us working diligently. On what, you ask?

Well, there is the multimedia group working on the next generation of Phonon and Amarok (there's a PulseAudio fellow here with them, so that's also getting attention), there's the KDevelop group hacking on making it awesome (there's a new Plasma dashboard for it, too!) and the Semantic Desktop group (Nepomuk, Zeitgeist and Plasma devs) going mad on improving the infrastructure and implementation of those technologies and working on how well they integrate with each other. While we had a series of lightning talk updates from each group yesterday, I'm still not up to date on all the details of each group. Even though I visit them during meal times and occasionally in the day, there is too much going on and I'm too busy with Platform 11 to be able to blog about those events in detail. I'll leave that to those attending those events. :)

So what have we been doing at Platform 11? In short:

• Working on what we want the relationship between future Qt and KDE's libraries to be. We will be sharing our ideas on the mailing lists as we finish documenting them.


• Preparing for the inevitable coming of Qt5 by going through each class in kdelibs, yes all 200+ of them, and cataloging where they belong in the scheme of things. This might include targeting inclusion or integration with Qt, refinement or deprecation. We are aiming for source compatibility as much as possible, however, just as Qt5 is.


• Cataloging each and every item in kde-runtime (all 102 of them, according to our spreadsheet) and dividing them out into function. Let's just say that runtime will become a lot smaller and properly focused in upcoming releases.


• Examining our existing library solutions and determining what to do with them. There is likely to be a significant, mostly source compatible, change to KConfig, for instance. A SecretService based internal overhaul of KWallet has also been seeing considerable progress here.


• Working on the git workflow we want to use for the libraries, runtime and workspaces (and hopefully as many other KDE hosted projects as possible). Cornelius just finished up the draft proposal and Frederik has done some graphics for it as well. It should make its way to kde-core-devel in short order.


• As an extension of the latter, our release cycles have been discussed at length and consensus has been reached here in person. We will be sharing those results on the mailing list as well, and I don't want to blog about them until that occurs so that other contributors may be involved first before bringing the ideas to a wider audience.

In short, a lot of hacking, a lot of meetings and a lot of progress. The biggest amount of effort has gone into the careful dissection and examination of our platform in the light of what we've learned in the last few years, the coming of Qt5 and new frontiers both on the desktop and in consumer electronics.

The gorgeous mountains here in Randa have served to provide inspiration to our efforts and the sprints have already produced significant results. It's been great to see so many new people here (something like 1/3rd of the people were attending their first KDE sprint!) including some of our friends from communities such as GNOME.

A string of article for dot.kde.org will be written once things wind down here. The first people have begun to leave, and the exodus will continue over the next few days. It's always sad to see our friends and collaborators leaving, but being able to spend this time with them has been priceless. :)