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KDE Mobile/Sprints/November2011-Planning

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General

The primary goal of the sprint is to get KDE Applications ported to Harmattan using the plasma qt components from kde-runtime master, declaratives or plain QML for the time being where it lacks, but at least reach a good progess on those. Note, Calligra, Gluon, KAlgebra and maybe something else are already running on the device to a certain extent, so it is not impossible. :)

Date

November, 18th - 20th

Location / Travel Information

Berlin

Office

Newtonstr. 15, Berlin - Physics Institute of the Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.


Getting there by public transportation:


Getting in: Need to contact Thomas Murach about that

Hotel

Berolina Airport Hotel, http://www.berolinahotels.de/en/airport/location.html

It seems the wifi internet connection is included (I also hope price-wise, too): http://www.berolinahotels.de/en/airport/rooms.html

Public Transportation

Reginal trains/S-Bahn/U-Bahn/Tram/Bus Tickets

Zones

Everywhere you need to go is covered by the 'AB' zone tickets, with the exception of SXF, for that you need one for the 'ABC' zone.

Buying Tickets

Tickets can be bought at ticket machines which you'll find at every station and the bus stop at TXL. On stations with long-distance connections you might find two types of ticket machines, use the ones labeled 'BVG' in black on a yellow square, not the ones labeled 'DB' or 'Deutsche Bahn'.

Ticket machines always take coins, and sometimes bills and ec cards (no credit cards IIRC).

Prices and Price Optimizations

Single trip costs 2.30€ in 'AB' zone and 3.00€ for 'ABC'. The ticket if valid for a single trip (including changing trains, as long as you go roughly into one direction) for all means of transportation listed above, ie. you don't need two tickets when switching from S-Bahn to U-Bahn for example. Tickets have to be stamped before entering the train once.

There are a number of optimizations though:

  • You can purchase a batch of four tickets at once ("4 Fahrten Karte"), which costs 8.20€ for 'AB'.
  • If you plan to do more than 2 trips a day, purchase the day ticket instead, 6.30€ for 'AB'.
  • If you do two trips a day with 4 or 5 persons, consider the group day ticket ("Kleingruppenkarte"), which costs 15.00€ for 'AB'.
  • If you only travel for three stops, there is the short trip ticket which costs 1.40€. This might be interesting in combination with the next option.
  • If you are traveling together with a local who has a monthly ticket, one additional person can tag along for free after 20:00 on workdays and during the entire day on weekends and public holidays.
Schedule

Schedule can be checked online (see link below), which makes sense when traveling outside of the normal working hours on weekdays (where trains go every 5 minutes). During weekdays service ends at around 1am. On weekends, public holidays and nights leading up to those trains usually go all night but only every 15 or 20 minutes.

More Information

Local transportation in Berlin

Subway and railway map of Berlin

Taxis

Taxi to TXL costs 20-25€.

Airports

There are currently two active airports in Berlin: Tegel (TXL) and Schönefeld (SXF). Make sure you know which one to go to, picking the wrong one has only happened to locals so far and you don't want to change that :)

TXL is not connected to any train line, but there is a shuttle bus (called 'TXL') leaving in front of the terminal building towards the city center.

SXF has a station for both regional trains (red 'B' on white square) and a S-Bahn line (white 'S' on green circle).

Berlin airport website (includes airport maps etc.)

Agenda

Friday

  • Introduction among the participants
  • Discuss the KDE Mobile development, packaging, testing and publishing workflow
  • Development Environments (Madde, Scratchbox, QtCreator)
  • Technologies: Harmattan components, Plasma components.
  • Wikipage for documentation, something like Development/Tutorials/Mobile(/Handset/Harmattan)
  • Publishing process to OVI
  • KDE Integration into the platform (like kde notifications and so on)

Saturday

  • Work on the practice after the theoritical discussions
  • Madde script and automated way for adding the relevant KDE packages for development purposes
  • Get packaging tested in the practice, like putting a simple kde core library into the same package
  • Investigating about testing on the device. It is not any KDE specific, but the need seems to arise here for now. It should be addressed on "upstream" Harmattan wikipage, and having a reference to that from our KDE Mobile wiki
  • Collecting coding examples later, like it happens to be with the existing KDE Development Tutorials

Sunday

Working on the practice of the discussions during the previous days. People also continued the work on their applications.

Result

We wrapped up a decent wikipage about the findings which is going to help the KDE Mobile development workflow in the future, but at least for Harmattan: 

http://community.kde.org/KDE_Mobile/Harmattan

Notes

There is already an existing KDE Mobile page. Ideas from the sprint are also added there where appropriate. http://community.kde.org/KDE_Mobile

Tasks

UX

General

  • Sprint story to dot.kde.org
  • Group photo

Sprints

  • Check that our "discoveries" get into another sprints

Open Questions

1) OVI publishing story

a. What Android developers do with Qt application, Qt so files in the same package and dynamic linking (note: they cannot link against Qt statically because of the lgplv2 license)

Pro:

  • Somewhat consistent with Qt application publishing story on other platforms, like Android
  • More license agnostic
  • Probably more work for application developers
  • The application binary is smaller

Con:

  • Duplicated shared object files since they can be available in more packages' "local" place
  • Bigger target package size


b. Link against kdelibs and kdebase-runtime (plasma components) statically.

Pro:

  • Probably smaller amount of work for application developers
  • There are no duplicated local shared object files on the system
  • Smaller target package size

Con:

  • Extra effort (probably not small) and maintainenance: modify, test kdelibs and runtime, and then tackle again scratchbox and the Community Open Build Service
  • Less license agnostic
  • Bigger application binary size
  • Probably icons and data should still be embedded into the package instead of using resources.


Note:

  • The shared libraries could also be installed system-wide by packages, if every application was packaged correctly for the same version. Otherwise it can go haywire. It sounds ideal solution, but it does not really work in the practice in my opinion.
  • There is also a way of using libkok on this device, but that ships fairly outdated opportunity, and probably not even with mobile profile. It can get out of the fashion, and would probably require extra maintainance to build kde-runtime and so forth on top of that. It can be a workaround for certain applications, though.


2) Plasma Components

The list of the available components for now: https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-runtime/repository/revisions/master/entry/plasma/declarativeimports/plasmacomponents/qml/qmldir


Photos

You can take a look at the photos taken at the sprint after cloning the following repository: 

http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch%2Flpapp%2Fkde-harmattan-sprint.git&a=summary

If you have pictures to share with us, please do feel free to submit those.

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