KDE Traffic #44 For 8 Oct 2002 Editor: Zack Rusin By Leif Jensen and Zack Rusin Table Of Contents * Standard Format * Text Format * XML Source * French Translation * Introduction * Threads Covered 1. KMail Roadmap 2. 14 Oct 2002 - 15 Oct 2002 (11 posts) New GPG frontend 3. KDE 3.0.4 out 4. Kopete rework almost finished 5. 17 Aug 2002 - 18 Aug 2002 (3 posts) Qt GStreamer bindings announced 6. Dev. Newsflash Introduction Welcome to KC KDE! After a short break KC is back. Juergen, who was the editor during the last several months left us (please, remember to thank him for all the work he has done) and in between coding, finishing my degree and trying to find a job, I will be doing my best to fill the void. I decided to add a new section to our KC entitled 'Dev. NewsFlash' in which I'm planning to present information that somehow relates to KDE, like XFree86 news - in this KC you can read about Keith Packard's XCursor and Jim Gettys' RandR extensions. Our main topic this week is KMail. Without further ado: * Big, big changes coming to KMail near you * New GPG frontend * KDE 3.0.4 out * Kopete rework almost finished * Qt GStreamer bindings announced We hope you enjoy this week's summaries! 1. KMail Roadmap Archive Link: "KMail Roadmap" Summary By Zack Rusin Topics: KMail People: Richard Moore, Mickael Marchand, Aaron J. Seigo, Don Sanders, Stephan Kulow As some of you may already know, KMail is undergoing a major rewrite - I'll do my best to summarize what's going on with KMail. First of all we have three KMail development branches * HEAD - which is frozen for 3.1 and to which only bugfixes are committed * kroupware_branch - created and managed by our friends from the Kroupware project * make_it_cool - which is devoted to fixing all architectural problems in KMail, while at the same adding some new and exciting stuff, managed by Don Sanders, myself and Aaron Seigo So what does it all mean for KMail? Well, here's a quick summary of things that either are already present in one of the branches or expected to show up very soon: * VFolders - Don Sanders is working on implementing virtual folders, or as Don likes to call them "search folders". Big portions of it are already finished in make_it_cool. * Reworking dialogs and GUI - Aaron J. Seigo became the GUI maintainer for make_it_cool branch and he's planning to switch dialogs to use Qt Designer and make numerous GUI improvements in this branch. * Displaying custom headers - code already present in make_it_cool, Aaron will be working on the GUI for it. * System-tray notification - already present in make_it_cool, Ryan Breen did a great job, after reviewing his code he told me "my next goal, aside from whatever cleanup needs to be done, is to play around with the old passive popup notification patch that Richard Moore had kicked around a while ago. I would like to add expand the old patch so passive notifications (containing sender and subject) pop up from the systray icon on new mail." Great work, Ryan. * New mailing list handling code - you'll be able to subscribe, unsubscribe, get help, goto archives and do all kinds of funky stuff. The mailing list held in the folder will be detected automatically. I'm working on that and it should be in make_it_cool sometime this week. * HTML/RichText/Vim composers in KMail - Mickael Marchand (KVim author) coded the initial KTextEditor support for KMail. In the coming weeks I will expand KTextEditor interfaces to support rich text editing features and with the help of KOffice developers I will create an advanced KTextEditor component similar in behavior to KWord. Just imagine seeing the quoted text colored the same way the KMail reader windows colors it, while being able to embed images right into the text and of course composing HTML mails *cough* never ever do that though *cough* ;). It will go into make_it_cool. * KMail as KPart - most of you probably saw recent announcements of Kaplan, a completely plugin-based PIM application embedding KMail (you are free to choose what plugins Kaplan will embed - address book, notes, KMail, etc.) * Cached IMAP support - our friends from the Kroupware project have it working in kroupware_branch. Finally, you won't have to download the same emails from the IMAP server each time you want to read them. * KOrganizer integration - we have two approaches for this one - in make_it_cool we let applications like Kaplan handle it. In kroupware_branch, guys from the Kroupware project integrated KOrganizer right into KMail Besides those changes, don't forget that an incredible amount of bugfixes goes into KMail HEAD on a daily basis. Remember to visit us on the KMail mailing list and let Ingo, Marc, Carsten, Michael and the people already mentioned above know how much you appreciate their work. By now you probably wonder how those branches are being synchronized, considering that at the moment they contain almost completely different email clients. Well, developers are spending a large amount of time merging and porting changes from respective branches to the others. Stephan Kulow does a fantastic job merging patches from HEAD to make_it_cool (thanks a lot Stephan, I really appreciate it), I'm merging changes from HEAD to kroupware_branch and others are helping us in whatever ways they can (thanks Aaron, Karl-Heinz, Kalle and Daniel). All in all, we are all very excited and hopefully you will enjoy the next version of KMail as much as we enjoy working on it right now. 2. New GPG frontend 14 Oct 2002 - 15 Oct 2002 (11 posts) Archive Link: "New GPG frontend" Summary By Zack Rusin People: y0k0, Carsten Pfeiffer, Piot Szymanski y0k0 made an announcement on kde-devel mailing list saying: " I am actively developing a GnuPG frontend for KDE :Kgpg (http://kgpg.tripod.com). I think it could be nice to have it included in a kde package (kdenetwork for example), as several user asked for it. I don't know who is making the decision, so i am asking here. " A couple of people responded. Carsten Pfeiffer said " IMHO a gpg frontend for managing keys is very much needed in KDE. Maybe you want to develop it in kdenonbeta for a start, to let it mature? " Piot Szymanski asked : " Isn't geheimnis a better one than kpgp? And AFAIR it works with kde3... (geheimnis.sf.net). " But the developers agreed that Geheimnis is far from a usable state and it seems that y0k0's Kpgp will become the default KDE PGP handler in a near future. 3. KDE 3.0.4 out Subject: "KDE 3.0.4 out" Summary By Leif Jensen For those not testing the KDE 3.1 beta full-time, there is a new release in the 3.0 series to upgrade to. The new KDE version 3.0.4 includes two security fixes an added translation to Basque and numerous smaller improvements as well. The security fixes affect the personal file sharing utility kpf and the kghostview postscript and pdf viewer. Advisories were released, and users should avoid these programs until installing the upgrade. So go to the mirrors or to your distribution's site and enjoy the latest stable version of KDE! 4. Kopete rework almost finished Subject: "Kopete rework almost finished" Summary By Zack Rusin As some of you may know, Kopete (http://kopete.kde.org) is the new KDE multi-protocol instant messager. A new version 0.5 is almost ready to be released. Continuing the work started for version 0.4 to cleanup the internal API, Kopete went through an almost complete rewrite of the contact list handling for this version. A lot of other things changed and improved as well. The upcoming 0.5 release of Kopete supports the following protocols: Aim (Toc and Oscar, although Oscar is still a work-in-progress for this release), ICQ, Jabber, MSN, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, and WinPopup, while work on the Yahoo protocol is finally progressing as well. The Oscar and Yahoo plugins are expected to be ready for general use in the next Kopete release. So please checkout, compile, test Kopete and report all problems to us (http:// mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kopete-devel) . Also, If you use the Gadu-Gadu protocol, KDE, know C++ and would like to become the new maintainer of the Gadu-Gadu plugin, please email me ( mailto:zack@kde.org) because I'm having serious problems finding enough time to work on it nowadays. 5. Qt GStreamer bindings announced 17 Aug 2002 - 18 Aug 2002 (3 posts) Archive Link: "Qt GStreamer bindings announced" Summary By Zack Rusin Topics: Multimedia People: Tim Jansen, Thomas Vander Stichele As some of you may know GStreamer (http://www.gstreamer.net) is a development framework for creating applications like media players, video editors, streaming media broadcasters and so on. GStreamer will be the core of the new multimedia architecture on GNOME desktop environment. Thanks to the work of Tim Jansen it looks like GStreamer has a good chance of becoming a part of KDE desktop. In his email to kde-multimedia mailing list Tim said: I have written wrappers for GStreamer (http://gstreamer.net). Most classes and functions have been translated 1:1 to C++/Qt. This should be almost everything that you need to write GStreamer applications with a Qt'ish feeling. You can find the code in KDE CVS, kdenonbeta/gst (http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/ cvsweb.cgi/kdenonbeta/gst). Thomas Vander Stichele, one of GStreamer developers was one of the first to respond saying: " This is great news ! You made my day ;) I have been thinking lately about how we can interact better with KDE developers and discuss the possibility of using GStreamer as the multimedia framework for both KDE and Gnome applications, and having actual code that shows GStreamer from a KDE point of view is the first step ! So I'm really happy. " 6. Dev. Newsflash Subject: "Dev. Newsflash" Summary By Zack Rusin People: Hamish Rodda * XCursor in XFree86 CVS - XCursor is a new XFree86 extension written by Keith Packard. Its sole purpose is to provide a colorful, animated and transparent pointer to your desktop. * RandR extension - the famous Jim Gettys got his RandR extensions included in XFree86 CVS. RandR allows one to change the resolution and depth of your X-server without having to restart it. Hamish Rodda already wrote a KControl module to control RandR, for a very early screenshot of his work look here (http://yoyo.its.monash.edu.au/~meddie/patches/randr.png) . Sharon And Joy Kernel Traffic is grateful to be developed on a computer donated by Professor Greg Benson and Professor Allan Cruse in the Department of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. This is the same department that invented FlashMob Computing. Kernel Traffic is hosted by the generous folks at kernel.org. All pages on this site are copyright their original authors, and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.0.