I am happy to announce that Berlin has been chosen as location for the Desktop Summit 2011. If you don’t know so far: Desktop Summit is a 1000+ developer conference co-hosting KDE’s “Akademy” and GNOME’s “GUADEC” at the same time:

Read the press release: Desktop Summit 2011 Announced

As Ubuntu member and head member of c-base e.V. I am part of the Berlin team, together with Claudia Rauch from KDE e.V. and Mirko Boehm of KDE. Let me quote Mirko:

“We are honored and proud that our proposal was selected. What we look forward to the most is the inspiration our communities will draw from having the Desktop Summit together again, but also from visiting our bustling, welcoming city. We would like to thank all the supporters of the proposal, and will work hard to make the conference a big success.”

I am sure this event will become a success. And it’s a great opportunity to meet and greet across the letters before the “U” in “Ubuntu”.

The version 2.0 of the free LaTeX editor Texmaker has been released today. The most notable changes:

• a built-in pdf viewer has been added providing auto-refresh after a compilation,
• there’s a new option to the quick build command causing that Texmaker doesn’t launch a new instance of the dvi/ps/pdf viewer if the file is already opened,
• the tabular assistant is now complete,
• a new document can be directly created by copying an existing one,
• there’s a new wizard to set the “user quick build command”,
• the amsmath align tag has been added to the Math menu.

SyncTeX is not used.

The complete changelog can be found here. Click here for downloading versions for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows or source files.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Christian Schenk announced today that the support for MiKTeX 2.6 and MiKTeX 2.7 will end at the end of this year. MiKTeX 2.6/2.7 will be removed from CTAN on January 1st, 2011.

So, the last possible date for updating MiKTeX 2.6/2.7 over the internet is December 31st. Users of those versions are encouraged to switch to MiKTeX 2.9 expected to be released in October 2010.

German version | auf Deutsch

… also known as Ubuntu Global Jam is coming up swiftly, so make sure you put 27th-29th August into your calendar and talk your local Ubuntu friends into participating.

Ok, so it’s Ubuntu Global Jam. What does that mean? What’s going to happen?

Simple. It’s going to happen what you make happen. Whatever your team enjoys doing is great. The only requirements are: it needs to be fun and it should make Ubuntu better somehow.

Ok. What does that mean?

We had loads of different jams around the world already: events where people get together locally and make Ubutnu better by working on bugs, packaging, translations, documentation, testing, upgrading or whatever else they enjoy doing.

In the past we had events all around the globe, where new friends met for the first time, people learned from each other, people from other open source projects were invited and where everybody (most importantly) had a fantastic time.

If your LoCo team already knows when and where it’s going to happen, add the event to the LoCo Directory. We set up the event on loco.ubuntu.com already.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Jams has lots of information on how to to organise the event properly, and what kind of preparation your team mates should look into depending on what your team wants to do. Stay tuned for tuition sessions where you can ask all your questions. A good place for getting that information is of course loco-contacts or ubuntu-event-planners.

If you’re part of a LoCo team, please bring it up with your team, talk to them, find out what they like, meet and make Ubuntu rock even harder.

Hey ho everyone.

Dominik asked me to blog about a feature in Kate that is still (sadly!) pretty unknown and seldom used: Kate Scripting. As you should know you can script KatePart completely via JavaScript. As those articles explain, it’s rather simple to write functions and put them into a file to have them reusable. But what for those write-use-throwaway kind of cases, where you simply need to get a job done quickly and don’t want to go through the overhead of writing some full fledged, documented, action-binded, localized script?

Utility Functions and why JavaScript rocks

Note: Neither map nor filter will be shipped with 4.5 to my knowledge, sorry about that. But you can still use the each helper (see below) to achieve the same with a bit more typing…

Take a look at utils.js on current git master: http://gitorious.org/kate/kate/blobs/master/part/script/data/utils.js

Put a special note on the helper functions map, filter and each and how they are used to implement e.g. rmblank, [rl]trim and the other functions. Cool eh? And the best part, you can reuse them directly from inside KatePart to get a job done:

mail-style quoting

Lets assume you write an email or use something like Markdown or Textile and want to quote. You’ll have to prepend a few lines with the two chars ‘> ‘. Instead of copy’n’pasting like a maniac do this instead and save yourself some breath:

1. press F7 to open the Kate command line
2. write e.g. map "function(l) { return '> ' + l; }"
3. execute

Note: When you don’t have anything selected, the whole document will get “quoted”.

remove lines that match a pattern

This is something everyone needs to do sooner or later, happened quite a few times to me already. I bet vim has some esoteric command I cannot remember and emacs has something like C-x M-c M-butterfly. But with Kate most users only see search & replace and forfeit to the command line. Well, now it’s again a good time to use the command line:

1. press F7 again
2. write e.g. filter "function(l) { return l.indexOf('myNeedle') == -1; }"
3. execute

Now all lines that contain ‘myNeedle’ will get removed. Sure, this is “verbose” but assuming you know JavaScript it’s actually quite easy, expendable and - best of all - good to remember. At least for me, YMMV.

shortcuts

For simple cases I’ve now introduced a shortcut way of doing the above, that saves you even more typing, but is limited to simple evaluations like the ones above. If you need something fancy, you’ll have to stick to the type-intensive way. Aynhow, here’s the shortcut version of the two scripts:

1. map "'> ' + line"
2. filter "line.indexOf('myNeedle') == -1"

the guts: each (interesting for users of KDE 4.x, x < 6)

Both of the above are implemented using the each helper I introduced even before KDE 4.4 afair. If you are using KDE 4.5 and want to do one of the above, a bit more typing is required:

1. for map, you write something like this:
   each "function(lines) { return lines.map(function(l){ /** actual map code **/ }); }"
2. for filter you do the same but replace map with filter:
   each "function(lines) { return lines.filter(function(l){ /** actual filter code **/ }); }"

Conclusion

You see, it’s quite simple and powerful. I really love map-reduce and how easy it is to use with JavaScript. Hope you like it as well.

PS: I actually think about making it yet even easier, by allowing some syntax like this: map '> ' + line or filter line.indexOf('myNeedle') == -1, must take a look on how hard it would be (beside the need for extensive documentation, but hey we have the help command in the Kate CLI, who can complain now? :) Implemented

Bye

Ich habe ja seit der ersten Version von KDE4 (irgendwann 2008) immer wieder versucht mich damit anzufreunden. Nun im April 2008 erschien Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Dazu gab es auch ein Kubuntu wahlweise noch mit KDE 3.5.irgendwas…. (wow die 3.5er serie gibt es laut diesem Wikieintrag schon seit fast 5 Jahren. Unglaublich) und alternativ das neue KDE4.0. Allerdings bekam diese Kubuntu diesmal nicht das Prädikat Long Term Support (LTS), aus nachvollziehbaren Gründen. Einerseits war KDE 3 ein Auslaufmodell und andererseits war KDE 4.0 eben noch lange nicht soweit LTS tauglich zu sein. Das wurde von Entwicklern auch unumwunden gesagt. Aussagen wie “KDE4.0 ist nicht KDE4″ und “KDE4.0 ist eine Entwicklerversion und nicht für Endanwender und Produktivsysteme gedacht” (sinngemäße Wiedergabe) waren wiederholt zu lesen. Nun, es folgte Version auf Version, jedesmal, so habe ich es in Erinnerung, mit der Suggestion wenn nicht Versprechen, jetzt ein stabiles, Endanwender-taugliches KDE4 zu präsentieren. Aber Pustekuchen. Allen Behauptungen zum Trotz, konnte ich bisher noch kein dauerhaft stabiles KDE 4 entdecken. Ein upgrade von älteren Versionen ob nun von KDE3 oder aber innerhalb KDE4 egrab bei mir immer nur ein instabiles, wackeliges zum Teil unbrauchbares System. Abstürze, hängende Anwendungen und der nervige KDE-Crashmanager, ließen mich immer wieder an obige Sätze zu KDE4.0 erinnern. Es fühlte sich alles irgendwie wie in einem Debug-Modus an, aber nicht wie ein Produktivsystem. Ein falscher oder zu schneller Klick und Komponenten des Desktops straften sogleich. Wenige Konfigurationsversuche an der Oberfläche und das System schmierte ab. Der Anwender, so schien es, mußte sich nach dem System richten und nicht umgekehrt.

Stundenlang saß ich dann mit anderen Anwendern vor einem Kubuntu 9.10 und rätselte warum sich dieses oder jenes Tool so störrisch verhielt. Einen neuen Benutzer angelegt und somit “jungfräuliche” user-speziefische Einstellungen hielten einem Test nur kurzweilig stand.

Im Gegensatz dazu, hier zuhause am Tower läuft noch immer ein Kubuntu 8.04 mit KDE3 inzwischen seit geraumer Zeit in Version 3.5.10. Kleine Ungereimtheiten, hängende Programme, seltene Abstürze, sowas kenne ich auch von anderen Systemen, ob nun  Gnome, Xfce oder eine andere Desktop-Umgebung, ob nun Ubuntu oder eine andere Distribution ob nun Linux oder ein anderes Betriebssystem, Fehler passieren überall und der größte Fehler sitzt oft vor dem Rechner und bedient selbigen

Hinzu kommt bei meinem Produktivsystemn, viel eigene Bastelei, die nicht immer zu dessen Stabilität beitrugen, eine Menge Fremdquellen und natürlich massig Nicht-KDE-Anwendungen. Aber im Großen und Ganzen, kann ich mit dem System arbeiten, kann mich darauf verlassen und etwaige Fehler sind auch für mich nicht irreparabel.

Nun kam Kubunt 10.04 und mein Wagnis während der LinuxTage (ich berichtete). Wow, meine Skepsis wich schnell Bewunderung. Sollten es die KDE’ler wirklich geschafft haben. Das System funktioniert, es ist stabil, vielleicht weniger intuitiv alsKDE3 oder Gnome, dafür sehr verspielt, bringt es viele Features mit. Es zwingt zum Umdenken gerade mich als eingefleischten KDE3 Fan. Nicht alles gefällt mir, manches wirkt überladen, an so einigen Stellen fehlt noch der letzte Schliff, aber es gefällt mir und erstmal gewinne ich den Eindruck: Ja KDE4 ist auch für mich bereit.

Leider erschien schon nach der ersten Nutzung von KpackageKit wieder der verdammte Crashmanager

gestartet , genutzt, beendet, ge-crashed

Aber hey, so schnell lasse ich mich ja nicht entmutigen.

Und da mir Kpackagekit eh noch nie zusagte, bzw. ich noch nichts besseres als Synaptic (ein Spitzen Tool!) gefunden habe, war das ruckzuck nachinstalliert.

Apropos KpackageKit, sicher ist es gewöhnungsbedürftig und sicher hat es auch seine Vorteile aber im Fortschrittsdialog der Button “Details” verdient den Namen nicht

default

Details

Lediglich ein weiterer Balken erscheint, der hin- und herwandert und somit immerhin eine noch vorhandene Aktivität anzeigt. Hier hätte ich mehr erwartet, z.B ein Terminalausschnitt der aktuellen Abläufe, wie z.B. bei Synaptic.
Auch hier kann ich aber mit leben, die Entwickler werden sich schon was dabei gedacht haben.

Inzwischen bekam ich noch den Tipp, doch mal das aktuelle stabile KDE 4.4.4 aus dem PPA zu installieren, gesagt, getan, alles lief prima, alles ging glatt.

Sollte ich hier wirklich endlich den heiss ersehnten Nachfolger des stabilen, anwenderfreundlichen KDE 3.5.10 vor mir haben? Nun ich bin immer noch kein Freund von Dolphin, aber zum Glück verrichtet Konqueror nicht nur als Webbrowser sondern auch optional als Filemanager weiterhin seinen Dienst. Es gibt inzwischen sogar (wieder?) eine kio für ftps. Lange habe ich mich danach gesehnt, da mein Webhoster leider kein sftp wohl aber ftps anbietet, dieses aber bisher von KDE nur stiefmütterlich behandelt wurde.

Nachtrag: Dieses Posting lag aus Zeitgründen jetzt mehrere Wochen in meinem Dashboard und wartete auf Vollendung. Betrübt musste ich aber kurz nach diesen Zeilen feststellen, auch diese Installation von Kubuntu mit KDE4 ist in meinen Augen nicht als Produktivsystem geeignet. So verabschiedete sich irgendwann beim Neustart des System nach dem Login der Windowmanager komplett und ichhabe noch kien Möglichkeit gefunden, diesen zu reaktiviern. Alle Fenster haben somit keinen Rahmen und sind nicht managebar. Alle Desktop-Tools sind nicht mehr zu sehen, keine Kontrollleiste keine Arbeitsfläche, kein Wallpaper…nichts. Eine schwarze Oberfläche, sonst nix. Immerhin Alt+F2 ermöglicht noch Eingaben über krunner.

Bisher habe ich dafür keine Lösung gefunden. Als nächstes richte ich mal einen neuen User ein und prüfe, wie sich das System beim Login mit diesem verhält. Sicher war das nicht der letzte Versuch mit kde4. Aber ein weiterer Rückschlag.

Hinnfallen, wie der Aufstehen

Grüße DxU

Good news everyone!

I’m happy to announce the availability of our first patch level release for KDevelop 4. You can get it and the related packages from:

http://download.kde.org/download.php?url=stable/kdevelop/4.0.1/src/

This is a bugfix only release and everyone is urged to upgrade as soon as possible. Below you find a list of changes that went into this release.

Users should wait for their distributions to provide packages for them.

Thanks to the KDevelop contributors for making this possible and to the users for giving us valuable feedback.

PS: I hope to release a second patch level release in a month, assuming we find more to fix.

Bye

KDevplatform 1.0.1 Changelog

1. * Milian Wolff: don't emit documentJumpPerformed when nothing changed
2. * Milian Wolff: prevent infinite loop when url gets saved and triggers loading of new language plugin
3. * Milian Wolff: fix ${selection} in snippets
4. * Milian Wolff: properly handle manual document switches in context browser toolbar
5. * Milian Wolff: fix: make it possible to activate repository in singleclick mode
6. * Andras Mantia: Really load (and use as a replace source) the global ui.rc file, not the local one.
7. * Milian Wolff: properly add codecompletion to existing documents
8. * Mantia Andras: Enable select all/copy in the frame widget.
9. * Mantia Andras: Propagate shortcuts setting to all the opened editor views.
10. * Andreas Pakulat: Fix accessing of temp-files for windows.
11. * Milian Wolff: properly handle unterminated strings in comments, fixes code completion after those
12. * Milian Wolff: properly remove watcher to prevent crashes in smartrange dtor
13. * Andreas Pakulat: Also set CMAKE_INSTALL_RPATH
14. * Andreas Pakulat: Make sure kdevplatform is properly linked
15. * Milian Wolff: put snippets completion items at end of list
16. * Milian Wolff: fix clearComments for unterminated comments
17. * Nicolás Alvarez: Create Class: Refresh move button state when a list item is removed too.
18. * Nicolás Alvarez: When moving items in Create Class inheritance list, update selection.
19. * Nicolás Alvarez: Update move up/down buttons when selection changes in inheritance list.
20. * Milian Wolff: prevent endless recursion
21. * Nicolás Alvarez: Change "Stop Jobs" icon from dialog-close to process-stop.
22. * Andreas Pakulat: Fix documentation for the .desktop files
23. * Milian Wolff: don't go into edit-item mode on doubleclick or single click
24. * Niko Sams: Fix crash when closing kdevelop with running debug session
25. * Niko Sams: Fix crash that can happen during shutdown with an active debug session
26. * Andras Mantia: Avoid calling emitResult() in failed case. internalJobDone() is called anyway, and that calls emitResult(). The problem is: when the error message is shown, the eventLoop is reentered, the job is deleted. The emitResult() call after tries to use the deleted job -> crash. This might be only a workaround, but fixes bug 229557 (and its duplicates), bug 227823, bug 232444, 227584.
27. * Milian Wolff: properly escape dot before git folder
28. * Andreas Pakulat: End the namespace before the macros.
29. * Jonathan Schmidt-Dominé: Fixed syntax-errors in ibrowsableversioncontrol.
30. * Milian Wolff: add a \c where appropriate, add missing dot
31. * Andreas Pakulat: Add some api dox how to get at plugins and load them properly.
32. * Andreas Pakulat: Use the complete url of the active document.
33. * Milian Wolff: make snippet invalid when name contains spaces
34. * Milian Wolff: allow anything non-space in snippet's code completion model
35. * Eike Hein: Meet HIG rules about alignment in forms.
36. * Milian Wolff: make QuickOpen look like a proper menu/dropdown
37. * Hugo Pereira Da Costa: Fixed setting of maximum height for button and stack so that expander arrow pixmap is not trunkated when small font is used.
38. * Hugo Pereira Da Costa: Removed unnecessary calls to "setAutoFillBackground(true)". this allows main window background gradient (if any) to be painted right. (like in e.g. oxygen, bespin). Does not affect other styles.
39. * Hugo Pereira Da Costa: Keep vertical size policy unchanged when embedding KLineEdit inside toolbar.
40. * Hugo Pereira Da Costa: Rotate back icon so that it is still painted horizontally even for vertical buttons Use option->iconSize to decide which pixmap must be rotated.
41. * Hugo Pereira Da Costa: This patch modifies the painting of sidebar vertical toolbuttons so that - the button frame is painted "non-rotated" - only the text is painted rotated. This fixes how buttons shadows are rendered. Screenshot at http://www.flickr.com/photos/hugo-oxygen-icons-org/4584572966/sizes/o/
42. * Andreas Pakulat: Increase minor version.
43. * Andreas Pakulat: Remove kross from subdirs list
44. * Bertjan Broeksema: Port away from deprecated KLibLoader::self to KPluing loader.
45. * Bertjan Broeksema: Initialize members in the right order.
46. * Bertjan Broeksema: Clean up
47. * Bertjan Broeksema: Fix warning and clean up.
48. * Bertjan Broeksema: Fix a compile warning related to deprecated hash_map.
49. * Bertjan Broeksema: Fix a bunch of trivial compile time warnings.
50. * Milian Wolff: fix LGPL file as proposed by TZander
51. * Milian Wolff: fix compile when ifDebug is enabled
52. * Niko Sams: Debugger: Only switch back to code area if there is an active MainWindow.
53. * Volker Krause: build with -pedantic
54. * Andreas Pakulat: Don't crash if dynamic_cast fails.
55. * Thomas McGuire: Fix progress popups being transparent.

KDevelop 4.0.1 Changelog

1. * Milian Wolff: fix overflow in CMakeFunctionArgument::unescapeValue
2. * Andras Mantia: Remove some conflicting shortcuts from the katepart.
3. * Milian Wolff: fix: allow incr as identifier, it's not the ++ token after all
4. * Milian Wolff: don't crash on nullptr type in getPointerTarget
5. * Milian Wolff: fix shouldStartCompletion when writing a path in a #include, inserted is not only a single char
6. * Milian Wolff: don't crash when getContainerType does not find a declaration for the identified type in the given topcontext
7. * Andreas Pakulat: Fix opening files with relative path.
8. * Andreas Pakulat: Set CMAKE_INSTALL_RPATH to lib-installdir
9. * Andreas Pakulat: Make sure kdevplatform is properly linked
10. * Milian Wolff: use canonicalFilePath as absoluteFilePath might lead to problems when resolving relative includes in symlinked directories
11. * Nicolás Alvarez: Fix another possible leak
12. * Nicolás Alvarez: Fix memory leak in CMakeListsParser::readCMakeFile.
13. * Milian Wolff: don't advance over EOF, might lead to invalid tokens and crashes
14. * Aleix Pol: Prevent calling a null pointer.
15. * Aleix Pol: Add proper support for the Break command.
16. * Andreas Pakulat: Don't try to open a non-existing file.
17. * Milian Wolff: make __volatile__ a synonym for volatile
18. * Milian Wolff: don't recurse into the same class in typeutils::getMemberFunctions
19. * Esben Mose Hansen: Find build directory even in root CMakeLists.txt
20. * Milian Wolff: fix uses in argument lists of pure virtuals
21. * Esben Mose Hansen: Use config mode as fallback if no module is found, and set package_DIR in all cases where a module was not found
22. * David nolden: Turn an assertion into a warning BUG: 236411
23. * Niko Sams: Remove support for building the whole extragear/sdk.
24. * Kovarththanan Rajaratnam: Remove FindCppUnit.cmake now that the CppUnit plugin no longer exists
25. * Kovarththanan Rajaratnam: Remove FindCheck.cmake now that the Check plugin no longer exists
26. * Andreas Pakulat: Increase version number
27. * Niko Sams: Quote variable expressions correctly.
28. * Milian Wolff: set invalid range on final location of problem when include path resolver found more paths than the build manager
29. * Andreas Pakulat: Fix kdevelop app icon for windows.
30. * David nolden: Use a mutex to prevent setupStandardMacros() and setupStandardIncludePaths() from being called multiple times at the same time, preventing a crash. BUG: 236434
31. * Bertjan Broeksema: Fix compile warnings related to deprecated hash_map
32. * Andreas Pakulat: Also search for qmake-qt4

KDevelop-PHP 1.0.1 Changelog

1. * Milian Wolff: fix compile
2. * Milian Wolff: remove includebuilder
3. * Milian Wolff: support $a->{$...}
4. * Milian Wolff: dont fail parsing on $c::func(); or $c::const; BUG: 244076
5. * Milian Wolff: fix use builder in static member arrays
6. * Milian Wolff: remove obsolete cmake file that never got run in the first place
7. * Milian Wolff: fix build of stable, we don't depend on kdevelop-pg-qt there
8. * Milian Wolff: fix logic to find already up-to-date files in the parsejob
9. * Milian Wolff: don't start include parsejob when there is already a background parsejob for that file, should prevent deadlock
10. * Milian Wolff: invalidate declaration done in method body when it got added to class body
11. * Milian Wolff: don't search in parent contexts for variables
12. * Niko Sams: Improve implementation helper: don't add return statement for void functions
13. * Niko Sams: Fix implementation helper for static methods
14. * Niko Sams: increase version number
15. * Niko Sams: Remove support for building the whole extragear sdk.

KDevelop-PHP-Docs 1.0.1 Changelog

1. * Milian Wolff: remove cmake_minimum_required, obsolete (due to KDE requirement) and breaks build when po files are included
2. * Niko Sams: Remove support for building the whole extragear sdk.

How many packages have you sponsored in the maverick release cycle? Check your mailbox for mails that have a header starting with [ubuntu/maverick]. Then subtract the number of own uploads (you can find them on the Uploaded packages site on your Launchpad account).

In my case, I have uploaded 45 own packages and sponsored 191 packages. That’s approximately four times more sponsored packages than own ones.

Is your ratio smaller than mine? Then go to the sponsoring overview and grab one bug and work on it. The code review process is described on the Ubuntu wiki.

And the last day of Ubuntu Developer Week is over now too. It’s a shame, but when can we do… watch out for the next one in half a year. In the meantime, there’s going to be a bunch of Packaging Training sessions as well, and Ubuntu Open Week, so it’s not like you’ll be twiddling thumbs the whole time.

Let’s re-cap Day 5:

• 16:00 – 18:00 UTC: Django And You (mhall119): First up was Michael Hall, who had booked a double session about Django goodness and brings in quite a bit of experience on the topic. He did a great job explaining the concepts behind Django, how to set up a basic project, lots of tips and tricks and what I liked best: he plugged the LoCo Directory a couple of times. Hope you’ll get interested and see how great Django is and how much fun projects like the Loco Directory are.
• 18:00 – 19:00 UTC: Adopt-An-Upstream (jcastro): Jorge was the best possible person to talk about one of the most awesome projects we have in the Ubuntu landscape: the essence of Adopt-An-Upstream is to be a tie between the Ubuntu project and others projects: you take on real responsibility by sharing information, by helping others making informed decisions and improve Ubuntu in a very real sense. Great session!
• 19:00 – 20:00 UTC: How To Help With Edubuntu (highvoltage): I’m glad we had Jonathan Carther with us who talked about Edubuntu, how it’s set up, how the team works and what the plans for the future are. Great!
• 20:00 – 21:00 UTC: Me, myself and QA (warp10, gaspa): Last sesion of the day and of whole UDW was about how to help with Quality Assurance in Ubuntu: basically making packages rock harder. Easy tasks, how to find them, what various terms like NBS mean, was all part of the session. Thanks a lot to the Ubuntu Italian Mafia Famiglia (no that name is not my invention ).

Again I’d like to thank everybody for helping out with making Ubuntu Developer Week rock as hard as it did. 350+ attendees, 25 sessions, lots of covered topics and everything happened in a very seamless fashion. Awesome. Thanks again!

Make sure to check out the logs if you’re interested in anything particular, they’re all on the wiki.

Christian Schenk has published the roadmap for MiKTeX 2.9. According to his blog the beta version of 2.9 shall appear in August and the general release of 2.9 is expected in October 2010. The new version will contain updates of pdfTeX, XeTeX, BibteX and of the editor TeXworks. LuaTeX will be introduced.

MiKTeX is a very popular LaTeX distribution running on Windows systems.

German version | auf Deutsch

The version 1.6.7 of LyX has been released. This maintenance release is the first to be supposed to run smoothly with Qt 4.6, that’s why the LyX developers encourage all users and distributors using Qt 4.6 to upgrade to this version.

For more information and download visit:

• the LyX Homepage,
• the announcement containing a list of changes and fixes,
• the download area.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Day 4 of Ubuntu Developer Week is over and it’s a bit sad to see UDW draw to a close again. On a happier note: all the sessions yesterday were awesome. Let’s recap together:

• 16:00 UTC: Create An Application For Ubuntu With Quickly (didrocks): What a great and action-packed session it was! Didier Roche explained how to create apps without a fuss and how Quickly makes clever decisions for you, so you have to worry less. Seems like he was very happy about the session himself, the audience even forgave him to try to make French the official language of Ubuntu Development.
• 17:00 UTC: Improving Ubuntu In An Evening (vish): Vishnoo did a great job explaining the Hundred Papercuts project and what it is about. Participation was great and I can already see lots of people getting involved in the project. It indeed is a great way to improve Ubuntu in an evening.
• 18:00 UTC: Contribute To Ubuntu Server, Do Server Papercuts (ttx): Thierry Carrez was up next and his session about Server Papercuts was a great follow up to the Hundred Papercuts session. If you’re interested in server stuff, like making things work again, read up the session log. He explained quite well who to talk to, how to get in touch with the same and make Ubuntu servers rock even harder.
• 19:00 UTC: How To Help With Xubuntu (charlie-tca): As Xubuntu project lead, Charlie Kravetz has a lot of insight into Xubuntu and XFCE. Heaps of good questions, lots of interest in Xubuntu made the session fly by quickly. If you’re interested, get in touch with Charlie!
• 20:00 UTC: Merge Proposals: Life On The Sunny Side (beuno/mhall119): Unfortunately Martin Albisetti got ill and could not give the session, but luckily Michael Hall jumped in to run a Q&A session on merge proposals. We might repeat the session in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

So today is the last day of UDW. I know you’re as sad as I am, but I’m sure you’ll enjoy the last day. Here’s why:

• 16:00 UTC + 17:00 UTC: Django And You – mhall119
  • Description: Michael Hall will run a double session about everybody’s favourite Web Framework. Django is a great way to build a dynamic website very easily. Sit back, relax and enjoy a session from one of the very busyLoCoDirectory hackers.
• 18:00 UTC: Adopt-An-Upstream – jcastro
  • Description: Jorge Castro is back again and will tell you how to adopt-an-upstream: how to take care of the one project you’re deeply interested in and make Ubuntu users and the upstream project even happier.
• 19:00 UTC: How To Help With Edubuntu – highvoltage
  • Description: Edubuntu is alive and kicking, but needs your help! Jonathan Carter will show you how!
• 20:00 UTC: Me, Myself And QA – warp10, gaspa and BlackZ
  • Description: Andrea Colangelo , Andrea Gasparini and Lorenzo de Liso are not only all from Italy, but are also deeply interested in making Ubuntu applications shine. How to take a package and make it rock from a quality assurance point of view is their topic. Join in and help to make Ubuntu rock!

Ubuntu Developer Week is not just amazing as always: this time it’s even better. The sessions are great, there’s loads of interesting details that were talked about but what’s even more important: we have loads of people attending who ask great questions and the first are already jumping in there and work actively on Ubuntu. That’s exactly what gives Ubuntu Developer Week it’s unique feel. I LOVE IT!

Yesterday was Day 3, so for those of you who did or could not attend, here’s what happened:

• 16:00 UTC: Operation Cleansweep And Reviewing Patches (nigelb and bobbo): Nigel Babu is spearheading an initiative which has the goal that there’s no unreviewed patches left by the end of it. To achieve that we set up a process that’s very easy to follow and involves QA people, Ubuntu developers, Upstream and Debian developers. Nigel and David Futcher did a fantastic job talking about the effort. Make sure you join in on the fun!
• 17:00 UTC: Forwarding Bugs And Patches Upstream (pedro_ and nigelb): Pedro Villavicencio Garrido is one of the best people to talk about evaluating bug reports and patches and being in touch with loads and loads of upstream developers about them and thus forwarding valuable information to software authors. His session was very informative, up to the point and it seems like there’s going to be even more people hanging out in #ubuntu-bugs soon.
• 18:00 UTC: Daily Builds And You (jcastro and dholbach): Jorge Castro and I talked about Daily Builds afterwards. This is a very exciting new technology in Launchpad that is currently in Beta stage. If you want up-to-date software you care about out there and users using and testing it, read the log. I think Jorge and I were sounding something between a comedy duo and an old couple every now and then – I hope you forgive us.
• 19:00 UTC: Make Your Applications Shine With Application Indicators (tedg): Ted Gould has been working on indicators in the panel for quite a while now and it was great to have him around to explain what’s going on and how to make best use of the technology. If your heart beats for Desktop stuff, you wrote a Desktop application or just want to know what’s going on and how things are evolving, make sure you check out the log.
• 20:00 UTC: Kernel Triage (JFo): Imagine there’s millions of users using all kinds of different hardware. Imagine there’s failure reports or some kind of hardware not working exactly. How do you deal with the feedback of those users? This is exactly that Jeremy Foshee talked about. As you can imagine there’s a lot of lessons the Kernel team learned already and lots of experience that went into the session. If you like all things hardware and want to give Jeremy a hand, be sure to check out the log.

As always: thanks a lot everybody who makes Ubuntu Developer Week happening. You know who you are and you’re awesome!

Day 4 starts in just a few hours, so here’s what’s happening today:

• 16:00 UTC: Create An Application For Ubuntu With Quickly – didrocks
  • Description: If you ever had a great idea for an application that makes the life of users easier and didn’t want to waste hours of getting everything set up, you’ll be absolutely right here. Didier Roche will show you how to get it done quickly.
• 17:00 UTC: Improving Ubuntu In An Evening – vish
  • Description: All you got is an Evening of Love for Ubuntu? Vishnoo will show you how to make an impact in just one evening.
• 18:00 UTC: Contribute To Ubuntu Server, Do Server Papercuts! – ttx
  • Description: Thierry Carrez works hard making the Ubuntu Server experience even smoother than it already is. Helping with Server papercuts is a great and easy way to get involved in Ubuntu Server development, so if you’re interested and would like to help out, be there!
• 19:00 UTC: How To Help With Xubuntu – charlie-tca
  • Description: Xubuntu is alive and kicking, but needs your help! Charlie Kravetz will show you how!
• 20:00 UTC: Merge proposals: life on the sunny side – beuno
  • Description: Martin Albisetti will talk about merge proposals, how they work, why they make your code better and how you can easily learn more by using them.

Hope to see you there and please help spread the news!

Jim Campbell did a great job in putting together a survey about our packaging guide. If you used the guide in the past, like it, and/or want it improved, please check out his announce.

Another day of Ubuntu Developer Week has passed and what a great day it was. Let’s re-cap:

• 16:00 UTC: Packaging Like A Ninja (shadeslayer): Rohan Garg brought a lot of fun to UDW by teaching us all how things work in the Kubuntu team. If I counted correctly he even handed out three orange ninja belts.
• 17:00 UTC: «I Don’t Know Anything About Translations» (dpm): By the looks of it, David Planella managed to resolve the problem of not knowing very very well. He gave an excellent overview over translations and how to work with them and answered what felt like a thousand questions.
• 18:00 UTC: Developing With Qt Quick and QML (Riddell): As a seasoned KDE-hacker Jonathan Riddell knows what’s going on in the KDE and Qt world and which technologies get you good results quickly. He gave great insight into making your KDE apps rock very easily.
• 19:00 UTC: How To Work With Debian (Laney and Rhonda): Wow, what a great session. I’m particularly excited to see people from Debian and Ubuntu collaborate like that and see that much interest in getting the most out of our work for both projects. Great session, lots of info, lots of good questions.
• 20:00 UTC: Setting Up A Small Validation Dashboard (zyga): The last session of the day was held by Zygmunt Krynicki who presented an interesting way to see how low-level changes affect the whole system and measure performance. The questions indicate that there’s a deep interest in solving this problem across the board.

Again, I’d like to thank everybody who made this day a success.

We have Day 3 ahead of us, so let’s see what’ll happen today:

• 16:00 UTC: Operation Cleansweep – Reviewing Patches – nigelb and bobbo
  • Description: Operation Cleansweep is in full swing, the goal is to review around 2000 patches and help to push them into the right direction. Nigel Babu will give a session that will explain very easily how to help with this fantastic initiative.
• 17:00 UTC: Forwarding Bugs and Patches Upstream – pedro_
  • Description: This session together with the one before will give you all the tools to effectively help Ubuntu, Debian and other upstream projects. Pedro Villavicencio will deliver this session and has great experience: he does a great job working primarily with the GNOME project.
• 18:00 UTC: Daily Builds And You – jcastro and dholbach
  • Description: Hold tight for Jorge Castro’s session about the latest piece of awesome of our Launchpad infrastructure. Daily Builds will change how we interact with projects a lot because it helps to bring the latest awesome to testers and enthusiasts very easily.
• 19:00 UTC: Making Your Applications Shine With Application Indicators – tedg
  • Description: Application Indicators clean up the panel and are easy to use. Find out how to use them in your application for a great user experience.
• 20:00 UTC: Kernel Triage – JFo
  • Description: Interested in the core parts of Ubuntu that make hardware work? Jeremy Foshee will take you on a tour through kernel wonderland and show you how to help out.

AWESOME!

What a fantastic start of Ubuntu Developer Week. At times we had 350+ visitors and the amount of great questions was simply overwhelming. Awesome. I also noticed the first few participants actively helping out after the sessions. This makes me incredibly happy.

So here’s a re-cap of day 1:

• 16:00 UTC – 18:00 UTC: Getting Started With Development (dholbach): This two-hour session was one of the most action-packed sessions I ever ran. So many great questions, so much fun and so much topics covered. Thanks a lot everybody. We managed to set up an initial Ubuntu development environment, talk about Ubuntu development processes and Ubuntu in the bigger picture. In the second part we had a look at a couple of packages that fail to build and succeeded in fixing a few of them. Awesome!
• 18:00 UTC – 19:00 UTC: Widgetcraft (apachelogger): Next up was Harald Sitter who did a great job explaining how to write KDE widgets by using the Plasmoid infrastructure. Lots of real-life examples, lots of excitement and slides for your reading pleasure.
• 19:00 UTC – 20:00 UTC: Desktop Team Overview (seb128): Sébastien Bacher did a great presentation of what’s going on in the Desktop Team and how you can help out. Maybe we should have an additional “Ask Séb” session, next time. Heaps and heaps of interested Desktop people kept him quite busy.
• 20:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC: Authoring Upstart Jobs (slangasek): Last on day 1 was Steve Langasek who dived deep into Upstart’s features and how to make best use of them. I foresee lots and lots of good use made of it.

Thanks a lot to everybody who helped to make Day 1 such a success. Awesome!

So what’s cooking for Day 2 you ask?

• 16:00 UTC: Packaging like a Ninja – shadeslayer
  • Description: The Kubuntu team has lots of ninjas on their team. Rohan Garg is one of them and will show you how to join the team.
• 17:00 UTC: «I Don’t Know Anything About Translations» – dpm
  • Description: If you’ve heard yourself saying exactly that at least one time, Translations Mastermind David Planella is here with the remedy: one hour of translations goodness.
• 18:00 UTC: Developing With Qt Quick and QML – Riddell
  • Description: Jonathan Riddell will bring you up to scratch with the latest goodness for developing Qt applications. Qt Quick and QML will bring a lot more fun to your life.
• 19:00 UTC: How To Work With Debian – Laney and Rhonda
  • Description: Debian is the most important project to Ubuntu. Being able to work effectively with Debian will make your life easier. Iain Lane knows this quite well and will give an excellent session about this. Rhonda from the Debian Project will round it up with some comments looking from the other side at it.
• 20:00 UTC: Setting Up A Small Validation Dashboard – zyga
  • Description: Zygmunt Krynicki will talk about a tool he is writing for Linaro and how to make use of it in other places. Dashboard is a tool for visualizing results from unit tests and performance benchmarks. Dashboard can be applied virtually everywhere where performance or regression monitoring is required.

Totally looking forward to it!

… it’s Ubuntu Developer Week time!

Starting from 16:00 UTC today, we’ll have one week of awesome sessions revolving around development, packaging, hacking and in general making Ubuntu better.

I’m very excited for the event to kick off, so let’s see what day 1 has for us:

• 16:00 UTC + 17:00 UTC: Getting Started With Development – dholbach
  • Description: As always we’ll start the week with a session on how to get you started. In this session Daniel Holbach will get you set up, talk about helpful tools and make sure you get the big picture overview first.
• 18:00 UTC: Widgetcraft – apachelogger
  • Description: Ever wanted to create your own amazing Plasma Widget? Now is your chance! Harald Sitter will show you how to create such a magical program and how to get your own fan club.
• 19:00 UTC: Desktop Team overview – seb128
  • Description: Sébastien Bacher will talk about how the desktop team is building your favorite desktop, what the common tasks are that the team is working on and what you could do if you want to contribute as well
• 20:00 UTC: Authoring Upstart Jobs – slangasek
  • Description: As you all might’ve heard upstart is Ubuntu’s init system for quite a while now. Upstart offers a bunch of nice features, which you can easily make use of, after Steve Langasek showed you how.
  • Preparation: Skim the init(5) manpage and bring your questions with you

I hope to see you all there and be sure to tell your friends!

Probably due to the soccer championship or the hot weather in some countries we had a slow week last week. Here’s the quick report:

Total bugs with patches: 2263 (-1) Reviewed patches: 331 (0) --- Bugs with 'patch-needswork': 86 (+1) Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-upstream': 133 (+6) Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-debian': 41 (+1) Bugs with 'indicator-application': 44 (-1) Bugs with 'patch-accepted-upstream': 47 (0) Bugs with 'patch-accepted-debian': 13 (0) Bugs with 'patch-rejected-upstream': 15 (+1) Bugs with 'patch-rejected-debian': 1 (0)

… which means: we need your help. Instructions are available and a warm welcome in #ubuntu-reviews certain.

Operation Cleansweep: Progress

Also: watch our for Nigel’s session at Ubuntu Developer Week about Operation Cleansweep on Wednesday 14th July at 16:00 UTC.

Only a few days left until Ubuntu Developer Week! I’m really excited and hope you tell all your friends to come there too!

Emacs’ diff-mode is a great tool to work with patches. You can move inside a patch by files or by hunks, it highlights the changes in each line and you can apply and revert individual hunks. However, diff-mode doesn’t work out-of-the-box with Mercurial’s MQ extension. To make it work, we first have to make Emacs recognize an MQ patch automatically like this:

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.hg/patches/" . diff-mode))

However, applying and reverting hunks will not work, because Emacs can not find the files mentioned in the patch, as it assumes that the paths are more or less relative to where the patch file lies. To fix this we add a function to diff-mode-hook:

(defun mq-patch-set-default-directory () (when (string= ".hg" (nth 2 (reverse (split-string default-directory "/")))) (setq default-directory (expand-file-name (concat default-directory "../../"))))) (add-hook 'diff-mode-hook 'mq-patch-set-default-directory)

A possible usage scenario for diff-mode with MQ could be that you want to apply parts of an (unapplied) MQ patch to your working copy, maybe because the patch as a whole doesn’t work anymore or you want to throw it away and only intend to keep a few bits of it.

Whatever you’re doing with this, I hope you’ll find it useful.