Hello everyone, long time no post.

As I’m used to do lately, I failed in keeping up all the stuff I’m doing in my blog, so I thought about writing a quick recap of what’s going on in my land.

Telepathy-KDE – New stuff

I am now working at Collabora: as I’m still a student, I got hired part time and have been assigned to telepathy-kde: so if you noticed some extra activity on my side being thrown into that part of KDE, you now know the reason 🙂 I have to say I’m pretty excited about that and I found myself liking the project and Telepathy itself a lot: expect some more news on this specific topic soon.

For the moment, I started getting involved into the various projects (including Telepathy-Qt4), and already achieved something: you can now handle your contacts through telepathy-contactlist (so adding/removing contacts, handling groups, etc…) and have them synchronized with the corresponding nepomuk resources. I am also writing a small API which would allow KDE applications to access Telepathy functions easily from Nepomuk resources.

Telepathy really brings a lot to the table, and it can be a great addition to KDE. Just keep an eye on us, you might hear some exciting things 😉

On a side note, a big thank you to George Goldberg for helping me in getting up to speed with the project.

KAuth

KAuth is definitely in "maintainance mode": I fixed some small bugs in the last days, improved backend handling with dynamic plugins, and it definitely appears rock solid – there are no open bugs against it that I remember right now, and it’s becoming more widespread by the minute. KDE 4.5 will probably feature KDM’s KCM using KAuth, which was probably one of the most awaited modules to be ported to this new framework.

I’d also love to see some more applications following the drill and abandoning the "launch UI as root" meme: for example, I’d love to see the excellent KDE’s partitionmanager (btw, it’s hands down the best software out there for managing your disks, give it a shot) using KAuth and no longer running its GUI as root.

On a related note, it is planned to have KNewStuff3 using KAuth for system-wide installation. Yeah, this means you will be able to install new wallpapers/plasma themes/amarok scripts/whatever you might think for all of your users.

Polkit-kde-1

Things had to slow down on that front, for obvious reasons. Although, in SVN there’s an almost working KCModule which is able to manage polkit actions and system administrators. Hopefully somebody will help me giving it the bit of love it needs for a release 🙂

Power management

In 4.5, PowerDevil has been improved a lot – this thanks to many people who came up with patches. Especially, Holger Macht pushed some bug fixes and some usability fixes (which removed some controls like power management schemes) based on the latest kernel and power management stack improvements which relieved various options from the GUI.

Also, there are some more patches by Felix Geyer which are in process of being implemented, which will fix some of the most annoying bugs (double suspension, brightness control) found in PowerDevil these days. So expect a better power management experience in next 4.4 releases and especially in the upcoming 4.5.

For the future (4.6 or 4.7), PowerDevil might undergo a partial or total rewrite, due to a variety of factors. First of all, I’d like to implement at least a good part of the features I described in this previous post; secondly, PowerDevil’s code is starting to show its age and my inexperience at the time of its writing; thirdly, there will be some changes in the Solid stack.

Solid::Control is about to disappear. Yep, you heard correctly: that small set of libraries in kdebase/workspace will be "eaten" by the components which make use of it.

Why? Because S::C is meant to be used by the corresponding component only (PowerDevil, NetworkManagement, BlueDevil…), and has never guaranteed API stability. Merging the code would allow us to reduce complexity and sparse code.

I already hear cries from developers who used Solid::Control::PowerManagement in their applications – but don’t worry. A basic API (e.g. just what you need) will be exposed (probably through DBus) by "future PowerDevil" instead, and I’ll try to commit to a stable API once this will happen.

Also, the logic for suspension/hibernation will be probably moved to the session manager, which is where it belongs. More than that, there will be some further improvements to profile handling, inhibition handling, and more stuff.

And we’re not forgetting upower (former DeviceKit) support: you might be able to use it very soon, as a backend appears to be ready somewhere. Just watch out my blog for an announcement.

That’s all, folks

Hope you enjoyed the reading. Give out your feedback, and if you’re interested in giving out a helping hand on any of these topics, feel free to get in touch with me, I’d be more than happy 🙂

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Posted in KDE, Linux, PowerDevil, Qt, Software

Tags: collabora, collabora-public, kauth, kde, polkit, polkit-kde, powerdevil, stuff, telepathy