Schedules/KDE4/4.0 Release Beta Goals

This page will list all the release goals for the beta cycle of KDE4. It will contain not only the goals, but also the current state and what YOU can do to help out.

You can not add new items to this list. Only maintainers should edit their own section. If you wish to add new items, send a mail to [email protected]

Plasma

• current state: showstopper
• contact: Aaron J. Seigo
• goal: A basic panel is there; current work is to flesh it out into a more capable panel system. System tray and taskbar both need work as does a desktop containment with legacy support for the Desktop folder.
• howto help: help is always welcome; there are a number of people contributing to plasma already but more help can make things go faster. If you want to help, join the irc channel #plasma or mail to [email protected]
• expected time of arrival: By the rc's.

Color configuration

• current state: nearly there
• contact: Matthew Woehlke
• goals:
  • missing current and default pseudo-schemes important
  • effects not configurable priority, but could live without
• howto help: We have this pretty well under control. Polish, Usability review, possibly help with the pseudo-schemes and/or effects tab would be nice, but if we have to, we can probably live with it as-is.
• expected time of arrival: early November, but usable as-is.

Oxygen style

• current state: showstopper
• contact: Matthew Woehlke, Boemann, #oxygen
• goal: no obvious glitches, fix all bugs on Projects/Oxygen/StyleWinDec
• howto help: ask on #oxygen, help needed for the corners of the windec.
• expected time of arrival: end of October or early November

Konqueror

• current state: showstopper
• contact: David Faure
• goal: Konqueror must be able to browse the web and to be used as a file manager again, I'm mostly aiming for "no regressions compared to KDE3"
• howto help:
  • Help is most welcome. [email protected] is the place for discussion of both aspects of konqueror development. Web browsing seems in better shape than filemanagement right now, so small tasks are fixing regressions in the webbrowsing-related code in konqueror and its dependencies. For instance there is finally a patch now about fixing the non-working Return key in the location bar URL; I'm sure there's more like that.
  • Bigger tasks include:
    • defining a future for the sidebar code (*no showstopper if this is the last item on the list*) -- volunteer(s) needed!
    • finishing the integration of the dolphin part for file management.
• expected time of arrival: november (if we leave out the sidebar changes), else december.

Dolphin

• current state: no showstopper anymore
• contact: Peter Penz
• goal: I think Dolphin is in a quite acceptable state now and I'll have a lot of time during the next week to fix the most serious bugs. David Faure and Rafael Fernández López also investigate a lot of time in Dolphin related things so I'm optimistic that Dolphin should be in a good shape for KDE 4.0.
• howto help:
  • I'm concerned a little bit whether the Dolphin KPart is matured enough for getting Konqueror in shape. Maybe David can comment whether some help is needed in this area (I've set David to CC).
    • I'm not sure about the state of Nepomuk. Currently the performance is too slow for sorting items by tags or rating. It would be possible to use an internal cache in Dolphin for this, but this would only reduce the time from O(n*log(n)) to O(n) and the problem is n: reading e. g. 30 items takes several seconds... Maybe Sebastian Trüg could need some support. In the worst case I'd suggest to remove the "sort by tags" and "sort by rating" feature in Dolphin for KDE 4.0.
• expected time of arrival: My plan is that all serious bugs get closed until the end of September. No known showstoppers are left :-)

Kate

• current state: some missing features & bugs, but usable
• contact: Kate Team
• goal: The KDE 4 version of Kate should at least inlude the known KDE 3 features with additions. We have some new stuff around already but some old is lacking correct porting (beside new introduced bugs). There is a massive need for bugfixing and help getting old stuff back to work, like printing.
• howto help:
  • fix printing Fixed by Anders, 2007-10-20
  • fix shortcut settings
  • rendering bugfixes
  • config saving bugfixes
  • testing
• expected time of arrival:

Printing

• current state: showstopper
• contact: Alex Merry (randomguy3)
• goal: Printing support working in all applications that can currently print, with print preview and customisable dialogs; no applications depending on libkdeprint, except for the printing kcm
• help needed: Most of the necessary API is in place: KPrintPreview in kutils and KdePrint::createPrintDialog() in kdeui. We currently have no way to print pdf or ps files directly (as used by Okular, for example), but this is being worked on by John Layt.
• howto help: send e-mail to the [email protected] mailing list, or email the maintainer of a program volunteering to port its printing support.
• expected time of arrival: API by 3rd Nov?

Sound

• current state: showstopper
• contact: Matthias Kretz
• goal:
  1. no showstopper: do some more automatic tests that all sound devices work as expected
  2. done.
  3. usable KMix
  4. Playing short sound files sometimes only plays the start of the sound (which can be almost nothing). This is a showstopper for notification sounds. Some reported that this is a bug in xine-lib, but I have not looked into the issue.
• howto help: I certainly want help. But I don't know how I could label any of the tasks as small because for most things you need quite a good overview... :-( Mailinglists: [email protected] or [email protected], IRC: #phonon ping Vir
  • Local audio playback is working quite OK, but there are some issues that are still open:
    • https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=284171
    • Sound hardware/ALSA setup
      • There's a report that outputting to a dmix: ALSA device using a hardware mixing capable soundcard made mixing not work at all (don't ask me why), so the ALSA device name choosing algorithm might need to become a bit smarter. I think the safest bet for now is to use the default:CARD=... device string, but with that you can only choose what card you want, not what device on that card (I don't have hardware where this would make a difference, so no idea if it's needed).
      • Even though defaults.pcm.ipc_gid is set to audio and defaults.pcm.ipc_perm is set to 0660, dmix does not work for more than one user at the same time (both users are in the audio group). A workaround is to set ipc_perm to 0666, but a real fix would be nicer.
    • kmix is not in a good state (yet). Also it still does not react on plugged/unplugged soundcard or new/removed software control.
    • Playing short sound files sometimes only plays the start of the sound (which can be almost nothing). This is a big problem for notifications. Some reported that this is a bug in xine-lib, but I have not looked into the issue.
    • xine-lib behaves bad wrt. memory allocations. run e.g. mediaobjecttest in valgrind --tool=massif
• expected time of arrival: For 4. I have no idea because I don't know the cause. 3. is a bit out of my scope, though I might come up with a test app that does what I want soon...

Co-installability

• current state: Almost there
• contact: k-c-d
• goal: Distros should be able to coinstall packages in the same prefix in a way that makes it possible to use kde3 apps on a kde4 desktop or to use kde4 apps on a kde3 desktop.
• details:
  • kde3libs, kde4libs, kdepimlibs, kde4base(apps, runtime, workspace) should be coinstallable => kde3 apps in a kde4 desktop
  • AND
  • kde3libs, kde3base, kde4libs, kdepimlibs, kde4base-runtime should be coinstallable => kde4 apps in a kde3 desktop
  • And only those with the -devel stuff stripped out.
• NOTE
  • This does not cover apps like konsole, konqueror, kmail, ... There can of course only be one of each application installed in same prefix. It is only about the runtime parts of the other desktop.
• expected time of arrival: Very soon