Just a quicky on "what I did this week-end".
And yet another week-end which went away like a blast... of course
it was again the fault of KDE! I went all the way to Osnabrück to
attend the traditional KDE PIM sprint. This one was a first for me
despite the fact that it was its tenth edition.
My plan before flying in was simple and easy to remember: "Sit with
David Faure and fix all his IMAP bugs". It turned out not that easy
to apply in practice. Of course, there's always something unexpected...
sometimes pleasant, sometimes not.
For the unpleasant part, we had a tough luck on Friday: David's travel
wasn't smooth at all so he arrived only during the night, while I had
a terrible headache during the afternoon and the evening which made
me only able to triage bugs (and at a very slow pace even...).
The pleasantly unexpected event which turned me away from my initial
simple plan was the presence of Christian Mollekopf and Björn Balazs.
I work with Christian on Zanshin, and I already interacted with
Björn quite a bit during the Forge 2011 for usability work... one plus
one being equal to lots, we ended up having meetings to discuss
the interaction schemes for Zanshin 0.3. I have to say I'm pleased
with the results so far. There's still a few gray areas but I think
we'll decide on those when we turn the ideas into code.
And for the IMAP support? Well let's say that despite the disturbances
which turned me away from my plan, the bug count went drastically down.
On arrival, there was a bit more than forty bug reports against the
IMAP resource, and between the triaging and the bugfixes we worked on
with David I'm now leaving the sprint with only twenty known bugs (also
a couple will likely get closed shortly since patches are in the work).
And again, a fairly nice and productive sprint, courtesy of KDE. I looove
this community!
Didn't blog in a while... Indeed the end of 2011 was hectic lots happening
(both at work and in the community) so almost no time to write about it.
Despite Christmas and the New Year I didn't take vacations in December,
I admit I'm now a bit tired.
Anyway, the last few months were awesome, as I said: lots happening. So let's
take a look in this post at the latest endeavours I participated in be it
technical or community work.
# Akademy-fr / Capitole du Libre
The path leading to end of November has seen [Benjamin Port][ben] putting quite
some work in the organization of the very first [Akademy-fr][ak-fr]. It's been
a very important event for the french KDE community.
This event was grouped inside the [Capitole du Libre][cdl] with an Ubuntu Party,
a DrupalCamp and two tracks of conferences on Free Culture. As usual, the whole
[Toulibre][t] LUG was a great support to organize such activities.
The first day, we managed to fit two tracks of talks in [Akademy-fr][ak-fr] itself,
one oriented toward contributors, the other meant for users. It was a nice success
overall even though we maybe suffered a bit from the user track of the
[Capitole du Libre][cdl] for our own track. That's understandable and something
to fix for later. We also had a booth where we demoed the different productions of
KDE. Using one of the Exo-PC with [Plasma Active][pa] on it was just great to
attract people, it is also great to show such a device next to a Plasma Desktop
powered computer as it helps illustrating how coherent thoses workspaces are
together (activites being pervasive concepts, same widgets to operate the devices,
etc.).
The second (and last) day of [Akademy-fr][ak-fr] and [Capitole du Libre][cdl] was
dedicated to workshops and labs. I think it was a really nice idea and we should
keep it for the next edition. There was a bit less attendance, such workshops are
more involving and requires to engage more with the community so it's
understandable they can be a bit more frightening. Still, it was just great to
get people trained on how to make a proper bug report, how to make their own
Calligra plugins and such.
Of course, the real plus of this event is that most of the french KDE contributors
showed up, we also got "pure-Qt" french contributors around. Funnily, all of
[KDAB][kdab] France showed up in the end. Anyway, it was really nice to gang with
already known faces again, but also to finally meet some people we only heard of so far.
Thanks to the [sponsors][cdl] who made this event possible. Also, thanks to everyone
who helped, held a talk, or simply attended: you made the event a success! Finally, I'd
like to give a special thanks to Aleix Pol who traveled from Spain to talk about
Akademy-es and KDE España (which are both nice inspiration for us).
*PS: I finally uploaded the handful of [pictures I took during Akademy-fr 2011][ak-fr-p]*
# Zanshin 0.2.0
Lot's happened around [Zanshin][z] which led to its first proper release. Most notably
it got its own website now, and we fixed bugs like crazies leading to the release of 0.2.0
the day before [Akademy-fr][ak-fr] (although the public announcement was done only the
week after).
It's also interesting to see it picked up by packagers, and now it is available on most
of the major Linux distributions and on Windows. Hopefully it will sooner or later reach
Mac OS as well, it has been reported to build and run by a couple of users but there's no
official packaging for it yet.
The community around Zanshin also grew a bit, with a couple of contributors gettings in.
I'm looking forward to see their influence inside the project. Nice ideas floating around
at the moment. We'll have to implement those ideas incrementally of course otherwise the
next release will be one of those long cycles again but I'd love to see shorter cycles for
Zanshin now.
# KDE Frameworks
After a period of some slow down, the KDE Frameworks is picking up again. I volunteered
to help with the stewardship of that effort which led to some discussions and the creation
of a [wiki to track KDE Frameworks state][kf5].
It's obviously still on-going so the wiki needs to be improved, but it helped quite a bit
already in decision making and figuring out where we are headed and where we want to be.
On the people side, we're getting contributions in but more importantly as we make kdelibs
more modular we're finding volunteers to maintain the newly created library. It think that
beyond the technical side of [KDE Frameworks][kf5] this trend is a very important one to
nurture.
Indeed, the number of maintainers in kdelibs has been only a few for a very long time, and
even though we have people interested in it they don't necessarily commit to be maintainers.
With the modularization it is apparently less scary to step up to take care of one of the
modules created, they're well identified, have a given scope and so on. Less unknowns then
leads to less fear.
I find interesting how the motivation for [KDE Frameworks][kf5] was mainly technical, but
is apparently changing the structure of the community. My take is that it will lead to a
somewhat similar organization to the [Qt Project][qt]. Only time will tell anyway, but
it's fascinating to be a direct witness of the on-going evolution.
# KDE Toulouse & Monthly Hacking Sessions
The [KDE Monthly Hacking Sessions][tak] are just running as usual, we keep having this monthly
get together on saturdays people carrying on their work, but also having a talk or a workshop
in the morning. Thanks to [Benjamin Port and Jean-Nicolas Artaud][ben] strong involvement, this
activity is more secure than ever not being completely dependent on me being available and
relaxing constraints on my own schedule. Thanks for that guys! It helps the whole group having
enough energy to undertake other activities (like the Akademy-fr above). Say no to burn-out,
distribute work! :-)
We had less people attending the sessions at the end of 2011, probably in part because of
[Akademy-fr][ak-fr] being around the corner by then. There was also some other factors but
we have plan to fix that. January's session, held yesterday was the proof of the continuing
interest in those monthly events, we had another of those high attendance rate of the good old
days. It was even further improved thanks to [Akademy-fr][ak-fr]. Indeed, we met Romain Perier
who attended the conference in November and we were delighted to have him motivated enough
to volunteer for holding the workshop part yesterday, travelling just for the day to do it!
Thanks a lot Romain! It was really nice to have you around, hope to see you soon again.
# Toulouse University Involvement
Bad news there... this activity came to a halt. We saw it coming for a while, but last year
was the last time our projects and teaching to run with the IUP ISI (the course of study
whose director, Henri Massié, trusted us to do a good job there). Indeed, after a few years
of political games (mostly driven from the ministry as far as I can tell), all the "IUP"
type of courses of studies disappeared. The IUP ISI was one of the last to carry the
torch...
I thought I'd just carry on with another course of study this year. But I have to admit this
abrupt ending and the way it happened (nasty details I'll spare you) just hit my motivation
more than I expected. So somehow I still have to recover from it, but I have some leads
and potential contacts to maybe setup something again for 2012-2013. Let's see if I manage
to revive that activity. Apparently, after seven years of efforts to nurture that
collaboration, I'm back to square one. Challenge accepted!
On the brighter side though, I got invited to a whole day seminar in Paris early February
to discuss and share with people on the topic of University/Free Software Communities
collaboration for student projects and teaching. Nice opportunity to meet with people
having similar aims and share on alternative setups to the one we had in Toulouse.
Really looking forward to this event.
# What's coming next?
Well, I don't plan much ahead and I'm not the type of guy taking "good
resolutions" in january every year (I just try to improve as I go). Still...
from the waves around me, my own motivation at the moment and some other factors
I think I can forecast a bit of what's coming.
Obviously I expect new [Zanshin][z] releases, at least two. Zanshin 0.2.1 should
appear soonish as mentionned earlier. And then we'll roll toward Zanshin 0.3
which will be the release where Zanshin gets more of the missing basic features
making it really useful.
I also expect the first [KDE Frameworks][kf5] release. Quite some work needed still, but
I have a target date in mind that I think we can reach... No, I won't share it
yet. :-)
Maybe I'll also get through the necessary mourning and administrative steps to setup
a new University/KDE collaboration in Toulouse.
And last but not least I expect our monthly sessions to go on as usual. It's just
great to have a small team of people helping with the local promotion, I'd like
to see it grow more to spread even more love. Despite the current team size it's very
likely we'll pull another [Akademy-fr][ak-fr], but this time truely focused on the
contributors needs, while the end-user aspects would be completely provided by talks
and workshops of the upcoming [Capitole du Libre][cdl] 2012.
And so that concludes my last look back at 2011. Time to look forward again, lots
to tackle still. :-)
[ak-fr]: http://toulibre.org/akademyfr "Akademy-fr 2011"
[ak-fr-p]: http://ervin.smugmug.com/Events/Akademy-fr-2011 "Akademy-fr 2011 pictures"
[ben]: http://blog.ben2367.fr/ "Benjamin Port's and Jean-Nicolas Artaud's blogs"
[cdl]: http://capitoledulibre.org "Capitole du Libre"
[kdab]: http://www.kdab.com "KDAB"
[kf5]: http://community.kde.org/Frameworks "KDE Frameworks development tracking wiki"
[pa]: http://www.plasma-active.org "Plasma Active"
[qt]: http://www.qt-project.org "Qt Project"
[t]: http://toulibre.org "Toulibre"
[tak]: http://toulibre.org/ateliers_kde "Ateliers KDE"
[z]: http://zanshin.kde.org "Zanshin"
A few weeks ago [we released Zanshin 0.2 beta2](/2011/08/31/zanshin-0.2-beta2 "Zanshin 0.2 beta2 release"),
and I'm glad to announce the immediate availability of Zanshin 0.2 RC1. Except if
any showstopper bug is reported, it will be the last stop before 0.2 final.
I'd also like to use the opportunity to report a few changes regarding
contributions and adoption. We've seen tremendous activity on the packaging
front since the previous release:
- It is available for openSUSE and Gentoo as previously announced;
- It is now available for Fedora thanks to Christoph Wickert of
[Kolab Systems](http://www.kolabsys.com),
you can grab it from
[Christoph's repository](http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/cwickert/zanshin/)
and it'll hopefully get into Fedora itself soon;
- I got pointed out that it was already available in
[Arch User Repository](http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=52024);
- Kartik Mistry volunteered to package it for Debian, so we'll have some good news there soon hopefully;
- Patrick Spendrin confirmed to me that it got added to the KDE-Windows port, and so it was officially
released with the KDE-Windows 4.7.0 release;
- On Mac? I got users building it for themselves reporting it to work, but no
official packaging yet.
I'm glad to see so many people stepping up like that, bringing some GTD goodness wrapped in
Free Software to more and more potential users.
And since some people pointed it out on my previous post, yes we need a website,
screenshots and so on. We've been aware of it for a while, but we've been too busy
working on the software itself. The feedback on Zanshin 0.2 beta2 didn't bring many
issues, so we used the extra time to work on a website. It's not ready for prime time
yet, but we hope to go live with 0.2 final.
If you want to get Zanshin from sources, the tarballs are available, at the same place than
usual on [files.kde.org](http://files.kde.org/zanshin "Zanshin tarballs").
And of course, you can still *git clone kde:zanshin* if you want the bleeding
edge or if you wish to contribute to the code.
Now we're waiting a bit for your feedback. We have exactly one minor bug left in
our list and the future website need some extra polish. Hopefully at this pace we
won't need a 0.2 RC2.
Zanshin, the TODO application which helps keeping your mind uncluttered
is back! After one month of waiting, we are delighted to announce the
immediate availability of Zanshin 0.2 beta2!
The focus has been mainly on bugfixing, but we also did a couple of
usability adjustments here and there. Also, thanks to the awesome Nuno
Pinheiro, we have an application icon (previously we were just hijacking
KOrganizer icon). This new icon is lovely, thanks Nuno!
The source tarballs are available, at the same place than the last time on
[files.kde.org](http://files.kde.org/zanshin "Zanshin tarballs"). If you want
to use it on openSUSE
[my repository](http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ervin/ "home:ervin openSUSE repository")
has a package for Zanshin, but it's now also available on the
[KDE:Unstable:Playground repository](http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Unstable:/Playground/ "KDE:Unstable:Playground repository").
Last but not least! Zanshin is also now packaged for Gentoo. Thank you to
Matija Suklje for working on it.
And of course, you can still *git clone kde:zanshin* if you want the bleeding
edge or if you wish to contribute to the code.
You can also contribute by helping us reaching more users:
- packaging Zanshin for your distro, we still miss big ones like Arch, Fedora
or Debian/Ubuntu;
- making sure Zanshin runs on MS Windows, apparently Patrick from the KDE-Windows
team was toying with that during DS but I'm not sure how it went;
- or making sure it runs on Mac OS (we're not aware of any effort on that
platform yet).
Now we're relaxing a bit, and waiting for feedback to see what needs fixing
for the next release. Depending on the defect rate next one could be 0.2 rc1.
Looks like we're getting closer and closer from 0.2 final!
We released Zanshin 0.2 alpha2 in May, it was about time we got our acts
together to prepare another release. So today I'm happy to announce the
immediate availability of Zanshin 0.2 beta1!
It is the result of further bugfixing and testing work. We got some
feedback from early users of 0.2 alpha2 and it's been reflected in our
bug hunting efforts.
Since the previous one was an alpha we still had the freedom to add a
couple more features. The features introduced for that beta were rather
non-intrusive though, the main ones are:
- the ability to set categories on projects, todos inside such projects
automatically inherit from those categories (greatly reduces the tagging
needs);
- the ability to synchronize collections directly from Zanshin;
- and last but not least a Kontact plugin, now Zanshin can work embedded in
Kontact (this one was actually a feature request, I didn't even think
about it). :-)
Now that we're entering the beta cycle, we're also publishing
[source tarballs](http://files.kde.org/zanshin "Zanshin tarballs"). Of course,
I still produce packages to openSUSE, although for the time being they're only
built against KDE:Unstable:SC, I'm waiting for kdepim 4.7 to hit other repos
before supporting more. Those packages are available in my
[home:ervin repository](http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ervin/ "home:ervin openSUSE repository").
And of course, you can still *git clone kde:zanshin* if you want the bleeding
edge or if you wish to contribute.
We plan to release Zanshin 0.2 beta2 somewhat soon after the Desktop Summit.
We're only in bugfixing and stabilization mode now, no new feature will be
introduced until we release 0.2.
Enjoy!
After quite some work on stabilizing, testing the core, and adding
some extra features, I'm happy to announce that I just tagged
Zanshin 0.2 alpha2!
The big highlight of this alpha is the availability of a new
krunner plugin, so that you can easily collect todos even when
Zanshin isn't running. Bring up krunner, type in "todo: buy
apples", and the newly created todo will be waiting for you in your
inbox the next time you look at your Zanshin window. Collect from
anywhere on your desktop now!
We also added an extra dialog to configure Akonadi resources which
is displayed on first run, and better defaults for the columns and
window sizes, which should provide a smoother experience for new
users. And of course it comes with more automated tests, and
bugfixes.
If everything goes well, it should be our last alpha, and we should
proceed with 0.2 beta1 next. For those interested, it is available
for openSUSE in my
[home:ervin repository](http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ervin/ "home:ervin openSUSE repository").
For the people wanting to build from sources, it is still a git
clone kde:zanshin away.
I'd like to thanks Mario Bensi and Benjamin Port who have been
fearless bug hunters for that release. Way to go guys!
PS: As mentionned, I package it for openSUSE myself as it is my
distro of choice, but we're obviously looking for packagers
targetting other distributions. If you're already working on such
packages, or are willing to work on them, please get in touch with
me for improving synchronization toward the 0.2 release.
Some people might remember that I was rambling a while back about a
TODO management application named Zanshin. It even has a few
users... they have probably been wondering why it got stuck at this
mysterious non advertised 0.1 version.
Don't fear anymore dear users, Zanshin is not dead, it is pretty
much alive, and we just tagged 0.2 alpha1 today!
It took us a while, we had to rewrite quite some bits in order to
benefit from the new additions of the Akonadi ecosystem we would
have missed otherwise. So we're back, and we plan at least one more
alpha, before going in the beta cycle. It is your chance to give us
feedback early on to get a solid 0.2 release.
Of course it is an alpha, so it might not suit you for production
use... Personally I switched to it in production and it didn't burn
my home yet. It will soon be available for openSUSE in my
[home:ervin repository](http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ervin/ "home:ervin openSUSE repository"),
once it gets out of the build farm (already the case for factory,
not yet for 11.3). If you're building from sources, it's only a
"git clone kde:zanshin.git" away (we're actually among the first
projects to migrate there).
I'd like to give a big kudo to Mario Bensi, who is working with me
on Zanshin. He did a tremendous job on that alpha. For the last
month I've been mostly giving architecture directions and reviewing
patches... still I had difficulties to keep up with the patch
stream he was sending my way. Great job Mario!
PS: As mentionned, I package it for openSUSE myself as it is my
distro of choice, but we're obviously looking for fearless
packagers targetting other distributions.
This week-end I attended the Tokamak Mark II, so the second Plasma
developers sprint. I was a really packed week-end, but that's
really enjoyable to have every body at hands. It's of course a
pleasure to team up again with very good friends like Aaron,
Alexis, Rich and the humongous Sebas.
It's also nice to have everybody on the deck ready for action. And
action we had, lots of different topics got covered: from the
framework itself, to the appearance of the shell, it's interaction
with the other major part of the desktop (namely kwin), the
integration of the features from Qt kinetic, etc.
Personally I tried to focus as much as possible on our service
framework, so for that I'm writing a library which will help
delegating all the service work to
[Jolie](http://www.jolie-lang.org). It's not there yet, but we're
definitely seeing progresses. I can currently write a program which
loads Jolie's metaservice, fires up a service description and talks
to it. It "just" needs to be wrapped into a nice API now.
[Jolie](http://www.jolie-lang.org) is really a pleasant piece of
software to work with.
Also on the first day, I talked about my new pet project: Zanshin.
A new todo/action management software, I'm using it daily for a
couple of weeks already without major issues. Of course it's still
a bit rough, and I have great plans for it in order to help people
to integrate it in there workflow. I want something simple and
flexible. I'll probably blog more about that in the coming weeks.
I'll end this post with a quote I used in my talk about Zanshin:
> If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open
> to everything. -- Shunryu Suzuki
I expect a 10 page essay about this quote on my desk next week.
;-)
