Blog A little Blog :)

Packaging improvement

I tried to improved a little bit our kde packaging since Mageia 1 by removing not maintained/used patchs in our kde package & also abusing of the %apply_macro to ensure that a patch available in the spec is *applied*
There's now some orders in our patchs process :

currently we have this layout in most of kde's package spec :

# Branch patch 100-199
Patch100: kde-blablala.patch
#  Trunk patch 200-299
Patch200: kde-blabla.patch
# Mageia/Mandriva/Fedora/whatelse patchs
Patch300: kde-blabla.patch

This mean that we won't have to rediff branch patch but eventually *our* patch if they don't apply.

The trunk part is here to add some patchs from trunk (yeah obvious), which has not been backported in current branch so in fact it's going to be used essentially when a bug is fixed in master & not backported (because branch is closed ) in our package.

During the rework of kde's package for mageia2, i did also split out handbooks from most of kde's package (the one available on the kde's live-cd essentially) in order to fix mga #2101 : in order to get some free space the documentation is not available in rpms available in the live-cd, the user will be able to install the documentation after installation by installing the needed -handbook(s) subpackage(s).

Kmail2 & nepomuk

While we were providing kdepim 4.4.11.x in mageia 1, we'll use kdepim 4.8.x for mageia 2 which mean the use of kmail2 which is akonadi based.

Kmail2 is also using nepomuk for the search function (& complains with a « yellow » banner if it's not available) so nepomuk is now enable by default and required by kmail.

Since some people does not like nepomuk i also managed to package nepomuk (at least the daemon & related stuff) in his own package so you can now disable it (as before) but also simply removed it from your system if you need it.

Speaking of update from kmail 1.x it should be handled automatically by kmail but i personnally recommands to start from a fresh configuration (which indeed might be not that easy for pop account).

Mageia configuration files

Some work has been done on this part too. First we're now providing a vanilla-kde4-config which allows you to have the « default upstream configuration » for your user instead of the mageia one.

Regarding our mageia panel i did switch (for test purpose but i personally like it a lot) from the default taskmanager to the plasma-applet-icontasks from kdeplasma-addons package.

This applet support launchers, have nice effects (& smooth-tasks does not compile currently :p )

I also (based on neoclust's initial work & Peace-'s work) created a nice javascript allowing now to restore the default mageia panel directly on a left click :)

No changes has been done so far for our ksplash, but i hope to work soon witch schultz & juancho on ksplashqml to see if we'll be able to provide a nice splash for Mageia 2.

Maybe some work could also be done on the Activities part but since means to really manage javascript here ;p

Packages to test

With cauldron we're now providing a social music player : Tomahawk .  I'm personally using daily especially.
Clementine 1.0.1 is of course available (with a non tested for the moment krunner plugin) & you can find in our repository amarok.
Digikam, which is now maintained by anaselli, is also available in the last 2.5.0 version.Thanks to fwang's work calligra 2.4.0beta6 is also available  (currently mageia 1 is shipping an alpha version but once final is done we'll push it to core/updates ).
I'll try in the next week to package Conquiere which is a tool using nepomuk to manage files & bibliographic data, Gammaray is also on the todo list :)

Bye bye,