Lazyweb is so worth it. Renze de Ruiter, you get stroopwafels for asking nicely. Or something. Mail me an address. And then, since I don’t particularly need anyone killed just right now, I’d like you to help out with writing plasma documentation. It seems Shane got the help and explanation he needed and in the spirit of giving back, will be writing some of it up. Nixternal’s call for participation on KDE documentation has also had a great effect.

For documentation and website content we’ve always managed to attract a good number of technically savvy people – e.g. docbook folk, php fröbelaars (that’s a peculiar Dutch word which I cannot render properly in English; much like the expression “bonte koe” which is a cow with variegated colouration, not all one colour, which I can’t find a good English word for either) and the like – but content has traditionally been hard. To which the documentation team, at least when Lauri was running it, always added something along the lines of “we don’t case if you write docs on beer coasters and mail ‘em it, we need the content and the technical whizz-bang will take care of itself.” (OK, that’s paraphrasing her a long way). So keep ‘em coming!

Something similar applies to techbase. On the Solaris lists I sometimes see people asking questions that are partly answered on techbase, then asking if I can update those pages with whatever answers I give (while also packaging KDE4 for them and porting the code and adding Solaris-specific features). There’s a chance to contribute. OK, not everyone has time or inclination to futz with wiki pages. That’s fine; but then understand my future reluctance to repeat information (eeehhh .. that sounds a lot grumpier than it should. Maybe I need to write “I wish folk would realize that doing a 15 minute job on a wiki page that I don’t want to update will make me so happy I’ll give them three days of coding effort” or something like that).

Right. I was being happy about the state of the community. There’s technical niceness happening as well, for instance in KHTML’s JavaScript implementation. I should add that Konqueror + KJS is now quite solid on Solaris, so I’m using Konqueror most of the time there (firefox for flash stuff). Many reasons to be technically happy as well.

One community event I failed to mention recently is T-DOSE which is in Eindhoven on october 25 and 26. CFP is still open until the end of july. Here’s a FOSDEM-light kind of event where you can present stuff you did around Akademy, for instance.

There’s also an interesting contest on security and privacy over at the NLnet foundation (they fund many Open Source and Free Software initiatives). The goal is “identify a comprehensive collection of user-friendly software (one CD-ROM at most) allowing a non-hacker, a normal human, to protect him or herself from the various threats on the internet, preferably in a one-click fashion.” That’s paraphrased from the contest brochure. I can imagine a PC-BSD based setup with powerful firewall configuration tools, a KDE UPnP Router management utility (see, ties in with that sprint!), gpg, kmail configured securely by default, etc. would do a pretty good job there.

On the Solaris front, now that we have x86 packages for most things (you need to use pkgtool to install them, as the standard pkgadd and pkgrm tools fail silently on some of them because of circular or bent dependencies) it’s much easier and nicer to start work on KDE itself. Fetch packages, install, kick off KDE compile. It’s a very practical application of our build server. 16 cores are faster than two, and the rate at which it crunches through KDE compilation is phenomenal. It’s gotten from start to kdeedu in the time my home box did 60% of kdebase. SPARC packages will take some time as we need to sort out build issues on the cruncher that we can use and my home box is just slow.

The Wayback Machine ⏲ does not archive everything. Broken links are marked with a 💔.