Being the workhorse for more than a decade, it took me by surprise that Qt 5 is going to run out of support tomorrow . Honestly, Qt 6 was released in late 2020 and I prefer using modern code bases that use features from the C++17 and C++20 standards. So, no reason to hold me back. I am pleased to announce the release of KDE Stopmotion 0.9.0. It consist of the Qt 6 port and has no additional features or bug fixes. Quite boring, it does not even look nicer or different at all. Many thanks to Florian Satzger and Mark Penner for helping with the port when I got stuck. Behind the curtain, we use KDE CI templates for the build pipeline, increased the minimum required version numbers for Qt, CMake and C++, and some minor warnings got fixed. We are back using semantic versioning. New features are added with an increased minor version number. Increased patch numbers are for bug fixes only. Adding sound does not work properly, this is a known bug. You can create the tar ball using the 0.9.0 Git ...
Most of the time programmers do not write new code. Instead, they read, try to understand, extend, and fix bugs in existing code. While some parts of KDE are pretty new and follow modern standards, many parts are more then two decades old -- following obsolete coding principles, using outdated ways of solving problems, and having additions from several persons with different styles. Often when we read code, we immediately spot things we could improve. Kent Beck's approach is applying a series of small tidyings that leads to structural change and an overall better software design. In his new book Tidy First? he describes his idea in three parts: Tidyings, how to manage tidyings, and software design theory. In the first part the author introduces generic tidyings like dead code removal, moving declaration and initialization together, introducing new interfaces, or explicit parameters. Most proposals are not new, but it is a good reminder to follow them and fix these things whereve...
