This week has not seen much development given that we are very close to the 4.9 final tagging. I pushed a little bit of refactoring into master (coming with unit tests), but apart from that we only had bug and crash fixes for 4.9.0 and even one regression in current master (4.10) got spotted and fixed. Thanks to Michael Pyne for bisecting and identifying the commit shortly after the commit had been pushed.
I’m personally very unhappy to see bug reports being opened for new issues in 4.9 even after RC 2 as it means that the previous beta versions have not been tested properly. None of the reported issues is a regression compared to the previous beta and rc releases, so they should have been spotted before. At this I also want to remind to report “obvious” bugs which you think someone had to have noticed. E.g. the fade effect incorrectly faded in a minimized window which got closed resulting in a flash with the window visible again. It’s a very obvious bug but might not be spotted by developers (e.g. I never close minimized windows). Interestingly this bug had been present since a long time but had been shadowed by another bug which got fixed in 4.9.
There has been one for me very interesting crash report which I cannot reproduce, but looking at the code the crash had been obvious and took me something like two minutes to fix. But as I don’t like pushing changes I cannot verify I wrote the first unit test which highlights an issue and verifies that the problem is fixed. In this case it was possible to write a test as the affected code is in the window switching framework which is seprated from KWin core and allows to mock the required objects. Nevertheless I had to introduce around 500 lines of mocking code to write a five lines test for a three lines change. Nevertheless it’s worth the effort as the next spotted bug in this area can be easily verified by a test.
What I’m very happy concerning the bug reports is that none of the bugs reported this week are still open. All reports have changed the state to either resolved or needsinfo. For a relaese candidate phase that’s pretty good, but still we are looking for people wanting to help with triaging the bugs.
Summary
Crash Fixes
- 303247: Crash after installed a new decoration
This change will be available in version 4.9.0
Git Commit - 303713: kwin crash when adding applets into the main amarok window
This change will be available in version 4.9.0
Git Commit - 303840: Kwin crash to do with hidden, empty or otherwise odd window titles
This change will be available in version 4.9.0
Git Commit
Bug Fixes
- 303397: KDE desktop effects are laggy when i uncheck Vsync option in system settings
This change will be available in version 4.9.0
Git Commit - 303579: Rapid flickering in locked screen — makes it difficult to unlock
This change will be available in version 4.10
Git Commit - 303891: Fade effect is being executed for minimized windows
This change will be available in version 4.9.0
Git Commit - 303630: kde-workspace fails to compile, see kde-core-devel post in URL
This change will be available in version 4.9.0
Git Commit
New Features
Tasks
- 303314: Refactor Screen/Window PaintData
This change will be available in version 4.10
Git Commit - 303093: Don’t use OpenGL matrix stack in OpenGL 2 backend
This change will be available in version 4.10
Git Commit
> I’m personally very unhappy to see bug reports being opened for new issues in
> 4.9 even after RC 2 as it means that the previous beta versions have not
> been tested properly.
Well, at least openSUSE still does not have a 4.9 repo. I don’t know about other distributions but at least I had no chance to test 4.9 because of that.
what about KDE:Unstable:SC? Kubuntu btw has daily packages through project neon which can be installed in parallel
KUSC contains trunk snapshots, not the 4.9 branch, so does Project Neon.
Aside from that I would need to switch distributions from one that has always been a close ally of KDE to one that was frequently sabotaged by Canonical (just look at https://picasaweb.google.com/kamikazow/KDE for enly two examples if you don’t believe me).
That’s not really fair – Kubuntu used to have these translation problems, but that’s long ago and they are fixed for two years or more already.
Is there a techbase page on building KWin from source (specifically, not the generic build instructions) and using a different KWin from what’s installed in /usr?
no, there isn’t. But it’s on my TODO. The steps are relatively simple:
cd to kde directory
git clone kde:kde-workspace
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../kde-workspace
cd kwin
make
installing to local path and running is just like any other KDE application. Concerning building there is a special step to do in case you are using Oxygen. Best just switch to a different window decoration. As I wrote: I need to document it, but it’s not easy for me as I have an automated system (kdevelop click build install, click execute).
Keep rocking my friend 🙂
Keep up the good work, Martin 🙂
Since KDE 4.0.0, I’ve been always testing betas and RCs, but this is the very first time I could not, because openSUSE doesn’t provide them.
If you see closer, their KDE Unstable repository still contains 4.9.0 beta 2 (look at the “kdebase4-workspace” package version number). It’s really bad that the once best KDE distribution doesn’t compile it, not even with its superior build service.
Anyway, I’ll report bugs as soon as I do an upgrade.