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Tidy First? Recommendation to read Kent Beck's book

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and follow modern standards, many parts are more then two decades old -- following obsolete coding principles, using outdated ways of solving problems, and having additions from several persons with different styles.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
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Release of KDE Stopmotion 0.8.7

Today marks the release of  KDE Stopmotion 0.8.7 ! About Stopmotion Stopmotion is a Free Open Source application to create stop-motion animations. It helps you capture and edit the frames of your animation and export them as a single file. Direct capture from webcams, MiniDV cameras, and DSLR cameras. It offers onion-skinning, import images from disk, and time lapse photography. Stopmotion supports multiple scenes, frame editing, basic sound track, animation playback at different frame rates, and GIMP integration for image. Movies can be exported to a file and to Cinelerra frame lists. Technically, it is a C++ / Qt application with optional dependencies to camera capture libraries. Changes in release 0.8.7 This release comes with no new features, but improvements to the project itself. Changes The project is now officially called to KDE Stopmotion. The former name Linux Stopmotion is no longer used. Support for qmake has been removed. Use CMake instead. Features Port serializat

Kile 2.9.95 / 3.0 beta 4 released

We have a release of Kile 2.9.95, also known as 3.0 beta 4! Earlier today, Michel Ludwig tagged the current Git master. This is the first beta release since October 2019. Beside the port to KDE Frameworks 6 and Qt 6, it provides a couple of new features and bug fixes. New features Port to KDE Frameworks 6 & Qt 6 (Port by Carl Schwan) Enable high-dpi support Provide option to hide menu bar (Patch by Daniel Fichtner, #372295 ) Configurable global default setting for the LivePreview engines (Patch by Florian Zumkeller-Quast, #450332 ) Remove offline copy of "LaTeX2e: An unofficial reference manual", use online version instead (Patch by myself, Christoph Grüninger, Issue #7 ) Fixed bugs Kile crashes on selecting "Browse" or "Zoom" for document preview (Patch by Carl Schwan, #465547 , #476207, #467435, #452618, #429452) Kile crashes when generating new document (Patch by Carl Schwan, #436837 ) Ensure \end{env} is inserted in the right place even when the

Tips to get involved in KDE as prepration for Google Summer of Code 2024

KDE got accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2024! Are you thinking about getting involved into KDE development? Check out the cool ideas KDE devs came up , they showcase what can be achieved by taking part as a student in GSoC. How to start? How to get involved? How to make an impression that will help your application? Prerequisites You like KDE, you like us as a community, you can follow our philosophy, you like our product (a desktop or at least an specific application), and you resonate with our tech stack (C++, Qt, CMake). Grab some code from our GitLab , clone a repository and build it locally. This sounds easy. For first-timers it is not easy. Reach out for help in case you struggle. Run your self-built software. Now you can explore the joy of developing KDE. You do not need an idea, at least not yet. Give it some time. Get involved Try getting involved. Usually it is not easy to fix bugs of implement a feature request from KDE bugtracking system . S

New programming language needed for KDE?

Disclaimer: I am not one of KDE's masterminds or spokespersons. I am a mere bystander with few unimportant commits. I follow KDE's ecosystem and other developments in the free software world. In the following, I share some thoughts and my personal opinion. Talks about new programming languages After 30 years of C code, the Linux kernel opens itself to a second high-level language: Rust. Since fall of 2022 the kernel mainly gained infrastructure work. Some experiments show promising results like a Rust-based network driver or a scheduler . Recently, Git developers started to discuss how to allow Rust code in our beloved version control system. Far from having reached a consensus, its media coverage and heated discussions in forums show how interested the public is in this topic. Other projects try to replace established software by rewritten from scratch Rust ones: uutils coreutils , sudo-rs , librsvg , Rustls . Heck, Rewrite it it Rust (RiiR) has become a meme . We already h

Use cppcheck to find bugs and improve code quality (not only for Kile)

Do you know isocpp.org's blog ? As an open-minded C++ programmer, I am a fond reader and have been inspired multiple times. I always enjoyed the blog posts from Andrey Karpov . He has deep knowledge with static code analysis and is a co-founder of PVS-Studio, a commercial static code analyzer for C++, C#, C, and Java. To advertise new releases of their product, Andrey and his co-workers scan popular open source projects with their tool. They explain the numerous results and showcase by these real-world examples how beneficial static code analysis is even for mature and healthy code bases. I found these posts both entertaining and instructive. If you are not aware of them, you might find them an interesting read: Clang 11 , LLVM 15 , Qt 6 , GCC 13 . I find this topic intriguing; nevertheless, for a long time I did not manage to dive deeper into this topic. I am a satisfied user of Kile , KDE's user-friendly TeX/LaTeX editor. In the span of almost 20 years (Is Kile really that ol