Posts tagged Plasma

KDE Platform Profiles: It’s alive!

Apr 29th

Posted by ervin in KDE

As part of the KDE/Maemo effort (that should get a more generic name really…), we’ve already seen emerging some SDKs to help us target the relevant platforms, some Plasma mobile shell, etc.

Still, one of the challenges is also to widen the scope of our KDE Platform. For that, a draft plan was made during Tokamak4, and since then we’ve been progressing carefully on the matter. We tried to get as much feedback as possible on the plan, not rushing things to make sure we weren’t stepping on anyone toes.

Today, I’m happy to announce that the very first corner stone of this plan got delivered. We added support for "profiles" in our platform. The CMake scripts for it got committed this morning, along with some changes to libplasma which effectively becomes our first library supporting those profiles.

By selecting a profile at build time, you get a default setup for our libraries which will enable or disable some extra features and dependencies. For instance, if you choose the "Mobile" profile the feature set coming from kdelibs will be reduced but on the other hand there will be much less internal dependencies in kdelibs, this way an application will only need a reduced subset to be able to run.

This more modular kdelibs depending on the profile chosen is of course only a first ongoing projects, but we have other topics to tackle like the runtime dependencies (namely klauncher and kded) of our platform. On this area we still lack reliable data as it is much harder to track. Still reducing dependencies during build time will be a big leap forward. And I’m truely excited because we’re slowly (but steadily!) getting to a slimer KDE Platform.

KDE, Maemo, Mobile, Plasma

Back from Tokamak II

Feb 10th

Posted by ervin in Conferences & Summits

7 comments

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. 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 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: