After years of working in the service industry, one thing which doesn’t cease to amaze me is the variety of needs our customers are and how we can still be surprised by them. They sometimes lead us in unexpected directions. This is obviously something I particularly like.
Today I’ll tell you the tale of a nice relationship enioka Haute Couture built with a customer down under.
It all started with a mail on a KDE mailing list a couple of years ago. People were looking for help. It was spotted by my colleague Benjamin Port who reached out. It turned out those people were from De Bortoli Wines an Australian winemaking company. They are known for using Free Software quite a bit and contributing when they can. They even got interviewed on the KDE’s dot ten years ago!
Not much really happened after our first contact but we kept the communication open… Until last year when they reached out to us for some help with Okular the universal document viewer made by KDE.
They wanted to get rid of Acrobat Reader for Linux in favor of Okular. They had one issue though, the overprint preview support was visibly broken in Okular though. We were of course motivated to help them get rid of this old and stale piece of proprietary software.
This looked at first like an easy task. Poppler (used for rendering PDFs) was exposing some API for the overprinting preview but Okular didn’t make use of it. We quickly made a patch to use the overprint preview API.
Alas, doing so uncovered another issue. As soon as we turned on the overprinting preview support the application would crash. We tracked it down one level down. Somehow the crash was hiding in the Poppler-Qt bindings.
After further exploration, it was due to the binding wrongly determining the row size of the raster images to generate. There’s a color space conversion occurring between the initial memory representation and the target raster image. The code was getting this row size before the transform occurred… and then ended up stuffing the wrong amount of data in the target raster. This couldn’t go well. Another patch was thus produced to address this.
The good news is that we managed to fix the issue in less time than the budget the customer allocated to us. So we gave them the choice between stopping here or using the remaining budget to address something else.
It turned out that we used the Ghent Workgroup PDF Output suite to validate our work beyond the samples provided by the customer. While doing so we noticed Poppler was failing at properly rendering some other cases. So we proposed to investigate those as well.
After spending some time on those… we made tentative fixes but unfortunately they led to some regression. So in agreement of the customer, we wrapped up and created a detailled bug report instead as to not waste their budget. This helped the Poppler community figure out the problem and produce a fix. That’s when we realized we came really close to the right fix at some point. Clearly an expert view on how the various PDF color spaces work was required so it was a good call to create the detailed report.
With still some budget left, the customer proposed us to also bring the overprint preview support to Okular printing. This was initially left out of the scope but necessary when you want to print your preview on a regular laser printer for instance. This required adjusting Okular and adjusting Poppler-Qt once more. It was ultimately done within budget.
Since the customer was satisfied with the work they came back for more. We setup a budget line for them to come up with issues to fix throughout the year.
Around that time, their focus moved more to CIFS mounts which they use extensively for their remote branches. As active users of that kernel feature, they encounter issues in user facing software that you would otherwise not suspect.
In particular they were experiencing performance issues when listing folders.
Interestingly, they would experience it only in the details view of the KDE file dialog.
CIFS mounts and file locks
We very much appreciate the work you’ve done, and difficulty surrounding the challenges you’re working through. Your approach/results are spectacular, and we are very grateful to be able to be a part of it.
It’s really a joy to have a customer like this. They are thinking long term, they come with interesting and challenging issue… and they’re appreciative of what we achieved for them.
Of course, if you have projects involving Free Software communities. Feel free to reach out, and we’ll see what we could do to help you.