{"id":1249,"date":"2008-04-14T22:08:34","date_gmt":"2008-04-14T20:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/2008\/04\/we-broke-plasma\/"},"modified":"2008-04-14T22:08:34","modified_gmt":"2008-04-14T20:08:34","slug":"we-broke-plasma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/2008\/04\/we-broke-plasma\/","title":{"rendered":"We broke Plasma."},"content":{"rendered":"

\n After Alexis has torn Plasma into pieces yesterday, some brave individuals svn up’ed, rebuild
\n kdebase and started putting the pieces backtogether. There are huge amounts of fallout right
\n now, but we’re getting closer to having some basic applets back. Currently digiclock, battery,
\n kickoff kind of work (modulo some layout problems in the panel), taskbar at least compiles
\n after some frenzy porting over the last hour. All this feels like a fast-track through the last
\n year-and-a-half through Plasma development. I can remember very well when we first saw a panel
\n and rudimentary clock appearing, the same happened today with much “ooooh” and “aaah” … :-)<\/p>\n

\n But Why?<\/strong> you might ask yourself, it started to look polished and now it’s
\n broken again. Well, Plasma in KDE 4.0 was based on Qt 4.3. Qt 4.3 lacked the widgets-on-canvas
\n support Qt 4.4 has. That means that layout managers and widgets had to be written from scratch
\n for 4.0. Now KDE’s trunk\/ requires Qt 4.4, including the widgets-on-canvas (WoC) support, we’re
\n able to use QWidgets, and maybe more important Qt’s layoutmanagers in Plasma applets and
\n containments such as the panel. So we were able to remove large parts of code in favour of
\n using Qt’s functionality — less maintainence burden, less bugs, less memory consumption and
\n all that included.<\/p>\n

\n And while that fixing of the WoC fallout happens, the next round of breakage is on the horizon:
\n Kevin, Richard and Aaron and The WhiteBoard have gone through all the classes in libplasma in order
\n to polish that, remove braindeadness and a couple WTF’s<\/a>
\n in the code. The plasma API should become much more intuitive, easy to use and future-proof. The
\n downside being another round of breakage and fixing all over the codebase. We expect the results
\n of the API review to hit trunk\/ later this week — including the breakage it introduces. After
\n that, we hope that libplasma is stable enough to have it move over to kdelibs, currently that’s
\n planned for the 4.2 timeframe. I’ve put the
\n results of the API review<\/a> online. As to the “Which face does this SVN account belong to?”<\/em>,
\n that’ll come later. Besides a working desktop, one needs something to look forward to. :P<\/p>\n

\n So if you’ve compiled trunk\/ after yesterday and wondered what happened and why someone visually
\n bombed it back into the stone-age (last year ;-)), now you know why :-)
\n If you want to help fixing up things, update trunk\/, join #plasma on freenode like others do
\n and fix obvious breakage. It’s not necessarily hard, but there’s quite some code crunching involved.
\n Do tell others on IRC what you’re fixing so duplicate work is prevented. Looking at the current
\n flurry of patches gives you a good idea what to replace with what.\n <\/p>\n

Of course this is all done during Tokamak, the Plasma sprint in Milano where we’re hacking
\n on your favourite desktopshell since last Friday. More exciting stuff has happened, but more
\n about that later, and of course in other Plasma hackers’ blogs. Suffice it to say, we’re
\n mightly productive and very cool things are on the road ahead.<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Alexis has torn Plasma into pieces yesterday, some brave individuals svn up’ed, rebuild kdebase and started putting the pieces backtogether. There are huge amounts of fallout right now, but we’re getting closer to having some basic applets back. Currently digiclock, battery, kickoff kind of work (modulo some layout problems in the panel), taskbar at… Continue reading We broke Plasma.<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kde"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}