Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 06:02:50 -0500
From: Navindra Umanee 
To: lwn@lwn.net, editors@linuxtoday.com, marty@linuxtoday.com,
Subject: KDE Development News: October [2/2]

KDE development tools. KDevelop and KDE hacker Bernd Gehrmann wrote in with this update:

With the 1.0 Beta 4.1 release, KDevelop has gone into the next round. Many important bugs have been fixed, and we are not aware of any situations in which KDevelop still crashes. If you still have problems, please read this note and give helpful information on bugs.

While the last bugs in the 1.0 branch are being ironed out, some exciting new features are already in the queue for 1.1: John Birch has written a powerful integrated debugger. The possibility to set breakpoints directly in KDevelop's editor windows promises fast turnaround cycles. Richard Dale has added support for Objective-C in kwrite, the class parser and some dialogs. A patch for kdoc is also available. So in the future, development for GNUStep could look like this.

Meanwhile, we are already working on KDevelop 2.0, which will be based on KDE 2. The compiler frontend (now colored) has been rewritten to support asynchronous message parsing. Further features include MDI support, a new grep frontend, DocBook support and the beginnings of a plugin interface.

Recently, Darius Stachow has made available a first development snapshot of KUML, a graphical editor for UML diagrams. The drawing engine is already very nice, but developers for other further diagram types are certainly welcome. An integration into KDevelop is planned, but of course KUML will also run standalone and support multiple languages.

Johannes Sixt has now released the stable 1.0.0 version of his debugger frontend kdbg. This is supposed to work both with KDE 1 and KDE 2.

Judin Max also gave us an update on KDE Studio (mirror). New features include a visual form builder (check out that screenshot), and a new plugin system with the "Bookmark" and "GlobalBookmark" plugins implemented. There's very little documentation available but if you have questions or want to help, contact Judin.

KDE2: Relentless progress. Daniel M. Duley has some great updates for us up on his site. Amongst other exciting news, he has redesigned both kghostview and kdvi so that they can now act as Konqueror browser views, rewritten the KStep widget style, and ported a whole slew of features to kicker including QuickBrowser, DND features, client-based dynamic menus and recent document menus. Also noteworthy: he is working on KDE tutorials written in the style of the Qt ones. Rock on.

Waldo Bastien posted his thoughts on a design for KThread, an attempt to make threading for KDE easy and portable. It turns out the need for threads had already been felt and a couple of independent KDE thread implementations from the likes of Bavo De Ridder and Lubos Lunak and Mirko Sucker already exist.

Roberto Alsina announced his effort to implement GraphApp/KDE with the aim of providing a simple C API for KDE. He is also considering implementing a CORBA interface for this GUI. Rumour further has it that Roberto is working on a BSD-free library that will provide some core KDE functionality potentially allowing commercial companies like RealNetworks and Star Division to more easily integrate their product with KDE. Roberto also informed us of the Lazarus Project, an effort that appears to have produced Pascal bindings for Qt.

Preston Brown announced kcmemail, a Control Center module that will potentially centralize basic configuration of the various KDE mail applications. The aim is to share basic common information between KDE email clients while each client will handle its own advanced configuration.

Rik Hemsley has implemented a system for giving user feedback while an application is starting. This has been a weakness in KDE 1, where naive users tend to click "Netscape" indefinitely until various windows and errors pop up all at once. Rik's solution fortunately does not involve turning the X pointer into an hourglass, but rather takes the NeXT approach and indicates that an app is launching in the taskbar.

Geert Jansen has implemented and committed kdesu, a graphical version of su that allows one to run a program under different user privileges. Also included, of course, is a kcontrol module for configuration. Stefan Westerfeld announced MICOSec, a wrapper for MICO that implements the ORBit authentication mechanism. Matt Koss announced Motif DND, ready for integration. He is considering submitting the patch for integration in Qt. Eric Bischoff announced the move from LinuxDoc to DocBook for all KDE documentation.

As for Krash, the release dude (aka Waldo Bastian) has announced that the KDE libraries are now in feature freeze; kdebase and koffice will be feature frozen on the 15th. The plan is to release Krash quickly and unfreeze everything so that developers can continue with the current furious pace of development.

KDE Applications.The KDE Forum has a nice feature article on Magellan (screenshots), touted as a powerful open source PIM rivalling Lotus Notes in ambition. Edwin Glaser announced the DataWidget project, the goal of which is to provide free data-aware widgets based on Qt (see also KMySql). Jeff Cody announced kGrep, a GUI utility for searching and displaying strings in text files (shots). Peter Putzer announced the latest version of KSysV, the SysV Init Editor. Mirko Sucker announced a new KDatePicker. Markus Goetz is looking for assistance with KWebSearch, a frontend for Web search engines.

QCad is an open source 2D CAD system based on Qt that might make a worthwhile port to KOffice. On a related note, John Dean is seeking volunteers to help port his 3D CAD system to KDE; a mailing list is available.

However, the honour for best KDE application this month, goes to Ky. All 567k of it:

"Ky is a KDE version of the useful unix utility `yes'. I find this comes in handy when I want to run `yes', but I don't want to page through the output using something like `more'. Instead, this gives me a nice GUI with a scrollbar. In addition, I can use copy and paste to save the output if I want."

As usual, if you are looking for packages of your favorite applications, check out KLPP. They even have the latest KDevelop and KDbg.

Other KDE Quickies. Cristian Tibirna has a slew of slides available from his workshop and talk at Alternative: Linux. Thomas Leitner announced a port of KDE 1.1.2 to Digital/Tru64 Unix 4.0f. Need free webhosting for a KDE project? Check out the new HOWTO. Finally, drop by Microsoft's site to see what they think of KDE.

An archive for these reports is available. Une version francaise pourrait eventuellement etre disponible ici.