CMake-ifying git

by ⋅ 10 Comments

I’m going to use git for a project of mine and instead of parsing git’s output (which is the adviced way to use it from your application), I thought I’d rather use libgit and link to it. The first step was getting rid of autohell and moving to CMake.

This patch against git’s current master branch includes the CMakeLists.txt file and a few modifications to the source (mostly due to the different way variable replacement works in autotools vs CMake).

So far, only libgit, libxdiff and git are built. Will I go go for the other binaries (gitweb, gitk, etc)? I’m not sure, as I’m not interested but it shouldn’t be difficult to CMake-ize those.

I think the move from autotools to CMake could be very useful for the msysgit* developers, as they no longer would depend on MSys*

* I have not tried to build git on Windows with my CMakeLists.txt yet, I’ll do it tomorrow

** It’s not actually true yet: I run two bourne shell-scripts but I could easily rewrite those in CMake, too.

Update I’ve produced a new patch, as the old one did not perform a few needed renames

Raising awareness of KDE on Windows

by ⋅ 6 Comments

Most of my coworkers use Qt4 but only on Windows. Some of them did not even know KDE existed, much less that since KDE 4.1 there are official packages and an official installer for Windows.

Last week, I wandered around the office, occasionally assaulting people to show them KDE on Windows, the API docs, this-and-that widget, answering their questions (mostly technical), etc (if you know how tackatpromotioned Marble at past aKademy-s, you know what I did 🙂 )

So, what was the reaction of people to KDE? Surprisingly, extremely good! I was expecting more resistance to the fact that to use K* classes, KParts, etc you have to convert your QApplication to a KApplication but they went like “the advantages of using KDE classes and KDE’s ActiveX [that’s how some of them call KParts] are so obvious I will do that as soon as I installing a development version of KDE on Windows is easy”. People specially liked the Kate, oKular and KPlato KParts (although I showed KPlato 1.6 and only on Linux). The pie-like ToolBox menu in Amarok also received some praising.

My conclusion: I really think we should raise more awareness of KDE among Windows developers and the “wander-around-and-assault-for-no-reason” approach works very well. Try it with your Win32 coworkers and friends and blog about KDE on Windows. Let’s get some momentum for KDE4 on Windows!

Is your keyboard working funny after updating to my backports?

by ⋅ 3 Comments

If you use Ubuntu and have added my Personal Package Archive to your /etc/apt/sources.list, you surely have noticed I have “backported” a lot of “sensitive” packages Hardy: Qt4, Glib, Gtk+, Cairo, lsb-base, HAL, hdparm, alsa, GNU parted, PCRE, etc. There are a lot more packages, not that “sensitive”: Samba, CMake, Telepathy, GStreamer, Rails, Boost 1.36.0, libvirt, Qemu, KVM, rdesktop, git, Apache, rsync, etc

If Ubuntu Intrepid or Debian Unstable or Experimental had the latest upstream version, I backported it to Hardy. If upstream was newer, I took the latest Debian/Ubuntu packaging and used that for the latest upstream version, with some fixes here and there.

This usually works fine because I’m careful and I test the packages myself. Actually, that’s the only reason I backport stuff: I usually need versions newer than the available ones in Ubuntu.

So far, the count had been “broke: 0 – fixed: a lot”, my biggest “success” being providing a fixed GNU Parted for bug 107326 months before Ubuntu did.

This time, however, I have inadvertedly inherited a bug present in some update (probably HAL), which makes your keys work in a “funny” way. First user to report that to me has been Michael Adams: “Having updated with your backports, I notice that my arrow keys have been converted to macro keys: my side keys don’t work, and up takes screenshots”. And indeed that happens! In my defense, I have to say I had not noticed before because I seldomly reboot my computer, so changes had not been applied to my system yet.

What’s the fix? Apparently nobody knows for sure (sometimes a reboot fixed it, sometimes setkbmap is needed) but it’s been already reported, see bug 255008.

Why am I posting this to Planet KDE? Because although the bug report barely mentions it, it does happen with KDE, too.

PS: If you use the ATI proprietary drivers, dual-head configuration, and one of your monitors is rotated (i. e. in vertical instead of horizontal), please contact me. Rotation was easy with NVidia but I’ve been unable to get it to work with ATI 🙁