COMMUNITY REPORT 1 ST QUARTER, 2012 | ISSUE 21 WELCOME MESSAGE Dear KDE members, contributors, During the first quarter of 2012, KDE awards, which makes us proud of our users, supporters, patrons, sponsors had major releases (4.8) of KDE achievements and generates positive and friends, Platform, Workspaces and energy to face new challenges. Applications, and a minor stabilization 2012 is turning into a pivotal year for release (4.8.1). These releases brought The KDE Community is working on a KDE in several areas. One of the most improvements in many areas, new approach to strengthen important is the Open Qt Governance, particularly KDE-PIM, Akonadi and relationships with other organizations which is a great opportunity to Nepomuk. through a networking program called improve collaboration between KDE KDE Connect. This new effort will be and Qt. Exciting times are ahead of us People are quickly catching on to the introduced at Akademy 2012. in this area. idea that KDE software is a mature, yet innovative multi-platform and We are looking forward to seeing you Akademy 2012—the KDE Community multi-device solution. Recent at Akademy 2012 in Tallinn on June Summit—will take place in Tallinn, improvements in cloud services 30th! Estonia. It is the first time for our integration and the development of annual event to be in eastern Europe, Vivaldi tablet are examples of KDE's which was a request from our momentum. They also demonstrate Agustín Benito Bethencourt for the contributors. Preparations are in full how successful we are when joining KDE e.V. Board of Directors. swing; this promises to be another forces with other Free Software great event. KDE has also had a projects and organizations. presence at many events around the world promoting our software and The KDE 4 series is attracting a lot of values. press and commercial attention. We have been honored with several CONTENTS Welcome Message 1 The ALERT Project 2 Supported member activities 3 – 8 New Members 9 Financial Report and KDE e.V. Board 10 THE ALERT PROJECT Stuart Jarvis The ALERT Project is a technology research project Two of subprojects of particular interest are bug partly funded by the European Union. ALERT (Active duplicate detection and community member profiles. support and reaL-time coordination based on Event pRocessing in FLOSS developmenT) aims to improve The bug duplicate detection code ranks bugs by their the overall bug resolution process in Open Source likelihood of being a duplicate of an existing report. It developers' collaborative environments. It addresses is currently able to identify 40% of known duplicates the ways Free Software communities track bugs in by looking at the 5% closest related bugs. This raises software, how trends and issues are identified, and the possibility of automatically suggesting potential how problems are fixed through active collaboration. duplicate bugs when a new report is filed, easing the The project brings together partners from seven burden on our developers and bug squashers. countries, from universities and research institutes to large IT consultancies. The partners range from those The community profiler (with the catchy name of that are familiar with free software (a few laptops at STARDOM) identifies key members in each team and meetings are running GNOME or KDE software) to particular strengths of developers. With this those who had never used a free operating system information, it may be possible to automatically before. KDE e.V. is a project partner and will be an end suggest assignees for bugs. In this way, even if a bug user, providing feedback and advice on the software is reported to the wrong team, there may be system during development. To assist with this, Dario suggestions of someone better suited to take over the Freddi and Stuart Jarvis are contracted to the project bug. Conversely, developers would be able to access a as KDE experts. list of bugs that the system believes they could be well suited to solve. The project has had its first annual review; the European Commission assessors were pleased with the The ALERT Project has over a year left to run. We progress. Most of the software components for expect to begin serious testing of the software before extracting data from our bug tracker, forums, mailing the end of 2012. Our chosen pilot project in KDE is lists and git repositories are now at the demo stage Solid. If the trials are a success, we may try and and are working well. The ALERT software will all be integrate ALERT components into our existing released as free software. infrastructure and make them available to all KDE contributors over the coming years. FUTURE CITY Ramon Miranda (& Krita) with permission Amsterdam - Past, Future Mango open movie project concept art - CC-By Blender Foundation, artwork:David Revoy (Krita) SUPPORTED MEMBER ACTIVITIES Developer Sprints database performance, especially may involve quality loss.) Thanks with SQLite." to this work, digiKam also gained multi-threaded metadata editing to DIGIKAM Projects: go along with multiple-core CPUs. GENOA Work then continued on improving "I figured out a way to distribute January 2012 even a simple operation such as the work—based on inter-thread Qt signals and slots—to multiple Martin Klapetek rotating an image. Until now, the code for rotation was a plugin, threads without having to change and so required different handling. the existing code. The solution In the middle of cold January, the digiKam team met in Genoa, the sunny old port city in northern Italy. Participants started gathering on a Thursday evening, getting together over dinner to form new friendships and to find out how people's lives were going. The next day, real work started on digiKam, KDE’s award-winning photo management application. Optimization: The main focus of this sprint was on optimization, but lots of new features digiKam Sprint Team found their places as well. Marcel commented, "This had works well.", added Marcel. The two lead developers—Gilles quite a few shortcomings; some Caulier and Marcel Wiesweg—met RAW files simply cannot be rotated. Francesco worked on internal for the first time with the newest For other formats the rotation step digiKam dependencies, mainly core developer, Francesco Riosa. involves lossy editing. Building on porting LCMS to the LCMS version The core team put their heads work which Gilles started, I have 2 library. LCMS is a color together to optimize database integrated the rotation code into management system with a small handling and processes so that digiKam, reusing our existing footprint; the API changed performance can be improved. editing framework. Rotation is significantly between LCMS Gilles said, "We have talked about multithreaded, fully integrated, and versions. The porting task is not separating database information can be customized in the setup. It trivial, but it's important to keep into dedicated files to prevent is now possible to rotate by setting digiKam in sync for the future. bloating files with unrelated a flag in the database, editing the Other library dependencies were information about images. This is metadata, or by rotating the full improved as well. already the case with thumbnails, pixel data; falling back to the best which are hosted in a separate possible solution if an operation is Gilles introduced a new progress database file. I introduced the idea not supported". (RAW metadata manager. It informs the user of to do the same with fingerprints may not be editable; for some background activity, including (the because this info can grow quickly formats, rotation by pixel data new) rotation, scanning directories, and it has an influence on KDE eV Community Report | Issue 21 | 1st Quarter, 2012 ev.kde.org/reports 5 Martin, both KDE GIF formats) while composing Telepathy images into a layout. developers, gave digiKam some Thank you: Instant Messaging The hacking room was generously love. Daniele wrote provided by a local FLOSS a new kipi plugin awareness group called Alid, which that allows people brings free software to local to share pictures schools, getting kids familiar with with their online libre software starting from age 6. friends directly via While the digiKam team was hard IM file transfer. at work, some members of Alid Martin explored prepared things to eat. Thanks to the possibility of their great care and feeding, we integrating face got to try lots of local Italian recognition with specialties. Nepomuk and displaying None of this would have been semantic data possible if it wasn't for KDE e.V., about the the main sponsor of this coding recognized person, sprint. All the participants send a mainly their online big 'Thank you!' to the supporting status and a members of KDE e.V. for allowing possibility to start us to make a huge leap forward chatting directly with digiKam and to find new from the face friends from all over the world. recognition interface. A Photos courtesy of the digiKam Sprint Team Genoa Plaza working prototype DB processing, batch image was spawned, but processing, thumbnail generation the road to a complete feature is and more. The progress manager still long (including a complete KDE PIM presents running tasks in a rewrite of the digiKam interface OSNABRÜCK readable way and allows users to with Nepomuk). February 2012 cancel any operation easily. Now even kipi-plugins can take Other new features were born in Jos Poortvliet advantage of the new progress Genoa as well. Angelo, a local manager, and other plugins developer, worked on improving The 10th KDE PIM Meeting in already do. Besides the digiKam printing of images from digiKam. Osnabrück took place from 10-12 collection management tool, Gilles Benjamin from France did February 2012. Starting with pizza also managed to close 40 bug tremendous work on a panorama Friday afternoon running until reports in 2 days.