annma's blog

From 12:00 UTC to late in the night, please join us on IRC Freenode network in the #plasma channel today and tomorrow.
We hope to triage all those bug reports and make Plasma even shinier!

So, what can you do?
- you need first an account to bugs.kde.org. You also need to have rights to amend bug reports states and we will have people giving you this right.

Since Monday 21st November, KDE is offering various and interesting tasks for students aged 13 to 17 through Google Code-In: coding, translation from English to several languages, screenshots for KDE documentation, bug triaging, outreach tasks to make KDE more known, ... you can see that anyone can find a task for his abilities!

I was putting together ideas for my talk at conf.kde.in about practical ways to contributing to KDE-Edu. In the process I was trying to list "qualities" that might be useful for new potential contributors and I was asking myself "what is the motivation for other people to contribute to KDE? what is my motivation?"My personal motivation changed over time. At first when installing my first Red Hat I did not realize the freedom part, the technical challenge of installing and running it appealed to me.

I'll be giving 2 talks at KDE conf.in in Bengaluru: one about how you can contribute to KDE-Edu with practical tips and some tasks to be done in various areas (development, yes, but also promotion, documentation, websites, ...) I plan to have slides (of course) but the slides themselves will be "light" so I'll release a PDF with precise details on what I said and which can't fit on slides! There will be also some wiki pages where people can apply for tasks.

Following my last blog post I have been working with Romario, Farhad and Sinny to add the Apply button code in C++ applets: they added the applet they would work on on the wiki page with their name, publish the code on reviewboard , I would check it and test it and sometimes ask the maintainer to double check then they would push or I would if they don't have access. Nearly all the work is now done, thanks to them!

Aaron implemented in plasma master (now kdeplasma-addons in in git) the functionality to use the Apply button in the C++ applets config dialogs: when you change a setting, Apply makes the setting visible without closing the configuration dialog.
So the changes were made in some plasma files and now all the C++ applets have to be ported. It's really a very easy job and I did it with the Picture Frame applet (so I could test my git skills and do my first push): you only need to connect all UI widgets in the configuration dialog to the slot SLOT(settingsModified())

We're at the end of post-beta 1 bug triaging week. When we triage, we first ensure the product (KDE program) and component (product sub area) are right for the bug report and that the title is accurate and in English.

I have to say this out loud: I am VERY impressed with Google Code-In students. Some of them took videos tasks: KDE is not very good in promotion (to say the least) so we issued some YouTube screencast tasks. The results are very impressive and we get new videos:

• BlinKen on Windows
• KStars on Windows
• Install KDE on Windows
  

A few tips on how to write good bug reports:

I'll carry on giving tips on how to make better bug reports but I would like to ask your participation at the bug squashing week which will start tomorrow and will last 7 days.

What is it? The aim is to detect and triage the more bugs possible so that the next beta already will benefit of an improved quality.

How? If you can install the beta, you have 2 possibilities: either run it in any possible way and report all the bugs you find. Or help triage and reproduce the bugs already reported.