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Changelog and Feature Plan Generator

This is kind of a new service announcement for our various maintainers and developers of KDE software. As I don’t like manual work and especially not manual and repetitive work, I decided to implement a tool which generates the markup for our changelog, which can be found in my scratch repo.

The changelog is generated from all bugs with a given version in the fixed-in field. So remember to add

BUG: 1234567889
FIXED-IN: 4.8.3

to each of your commits to the stable branch (please also add good keywords to your commits in master). This allows your maintainer to generate the changelog for your product in less than a minute. The bug’s summary is used as the changelog entry. So this is also a good reason to give a proper summary to your bug reports and remove junk like “KWin fails” 😉 Oh and if you don’t know the bug report to your commit, just perform a search (bugs.kde.org is really fast nowadays – so it’s no excuse!) and if there is really no bug report rethink whether your commit is a good idea for the stable branch at all.

I hope that this tool will help us to get a better changelog in 4.8.3, so please all help to make that happen. If I see good progress, I will invest the time to get the tool into a shape that our release team can generate the complete changelog for a release without any manual intervention.

Generating the changelog is not the only manual process I don’t like, also creating and updating the feature plan is an annoying process, especially as writing tables in MediaWiki markup is so much fun. If you use the bugtracker to manage the features you are going to add to the next release (have a look at target milestones) the tool can also be used to generate MediaWiki markup for the feature plan. Based on whether the bug is opened or closed a todo or done entry is generated. If the bug report is assigned to you the tool can fetch your mail address, but not yet your name (all KWin features are assigned to the default component).

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Less Than 200 Open KWin Bug Reports

After weeks of hard work by Thomas and myself the open bug count of KWin is finally below 200!

This is best seen in the graph plotting open bugs over time. In the weekly bug summary you now have to select the top 50 products to see KWin at all.

How did we achieve this great result? We have many user support issues in the bug tracker and many users don’t answer questions any more. Those bugs can be closed if the last comment is a year ago asking to provide the requested information.

Many bugs have in fact been fixed since the bug has been reported and we just have not known that there is a report for this issue. Also many bugs are just for so outdated versions (4.2 or earlier) that any information provided in the report is no longer valid. Not only KWin has improved a lot but most important also the drivers.

But there is still much more work to do in the bug tracker. 200 open reports is still much more than the number of real bugs which I expect to be below 100. So give us a helping hand. Reading an open report and trying to reproduce it is not that difficult 🙂

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KDE Plasma Daily

This weekend I read that the KDE:UNSTABLE:SC repository on the Open Build Service is up and running again. So I could finally finish a project I had already prepared but has been blocked by the missing updated packages: A Daily Live CD/Image for KDE Plasma. Additionally to KDE Plasma I put most of our KDE Applications on the image.

I hope that such an image can help test our software in a better way. At least for me it is an important addition to have something with our defaults to easily test.

So give it a try and report any issues and even better help me with this little project 🙂

As the KDE:UNSTABLE:SC repository is not updated daily, this appliance is also not updated daily, but most likely once a week.

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A more elegant KDE Plasma Window Manager and Compositor

Recently I have spent some time to make our window manager even more elegant. That is I decided to fix a few rough edges in our user experience offerings. All of these issues had actually been reported in our bugtracker as feature requests some time ago and listed as Junior Jobs, on the KWin ideas Wiki page and of course recently been added to the 4.9 milestone plan.

Unfortunately nobody wanted to work on these important yet easy to fix issues 🙁 So instead of waiting even longer I started to tackle the issues myself to ensure they will hit the next release. That means I invite all readers to participate in the development: it’s really easy and we are quite open and offer help to new developers 🙂 We even have quite some non-development tasks like requesting new categories on kde-look/apps.

The context menu when right clicking a window decoration has been synchronized as far as possible with the one of the tasks applets. Unfortunately we cannot share the code for technical reasons and some actions just cannot be available in both. E.g. creating a launcher doesn’t make sense in KWin and e.g. window tabs are a KWin internal functionality not yet available to Plasma Desktop.

While I was working on the menu I also decided to improve the “Move To Desktop” menu by using radio buttons instead of check boxes. A window is either on one desktop or on all – the checks do not make any sense as the actions are mutual exclusive. This indication is important as for Activities a window can be on a set of Activities and there check boxes make sense and are used.

Those users knowing the menu will notice that the entry “Configure Window Behavior” is no longer present in the screenshot. The entry has never opened any settings to configure the behavior of the selected window, which is quite confusing. It is in fact a quite exposed entry to the window manager settings. Based on feedback we got, including me asking non-technical persons what they expect this entry does, it got moved into the “More Actions” submenu and renamed to “Window Manager Settings” which is more compliant with other settings of our desktop shell like “Desktop Settings” or “Application Launcher Settings”.

Another area which received a few more improvements is again the Window Switchers. In addition to what I wrote last week cursor key navigation got added to our fancy switchers like CoverSwitch. So you now have a consistent behavior no matter if you use an effect or a QtQuick based layout.

In case there are no open windows when the Window Switcher is opened we now include the entry to “Show Desktop”. Defining the behavior for the Window Switcher when there is no window present is not trivial. The correct way would be to not show the list at all, but this would imply that there is no visual feedback at all to the user action. Also it is always possible that the last open window closes while the switcher is present. To handle such cases correctly we have so far shown a special text that there are no windows. But this has never felt very integrated as e.g. the thumbnail list is empty.

By adding the “Show Desktop” entry we have a consistent and correct behavior as the desktop will be shown after the user ended Window Switching. Another improvement in this area is that the wording is now the same in all layouts and effects. The effects used to call this entry “plasma-desktop”. Also as the icon we now use the same icon as e.g. the “Show Desktop” Applet which you can add to your panel instead of the Plasma icon. So all together some nice improvements to have an overall more elegant user experience in the KDE Plasma Workspaces.

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Window Switcher Love

One of my favorite features in KWin is Window Switching (aka Alt+Tab) and it is not surprising that it’s also one of the areas I prefer to work on and love to see others working on.

This week our Window Switchers have received quite some love from various contributors. The compact layout got some usability improvements and the highlight in all layouts does no longer move around when pressing Alt+Tab for the first time. Navigation with cursor keys when the list of windows is open, is properly supported, now. That is in a horizontal layout the left/right keys can be used to navigate through the list, in a vertical the up/down keys are supported and in a grid all keys are supported. Of course the normal navigation is still Alt+Tab/Alt+Shift+Tab – navigation through cursor keys is just an additional useful feature for those who want to use it.

Speaking of grid based layouts: I implemented a new QML layout in a “Present Windows” style. It is a layout showing thumbnails of all windows in the list in a regular grid and taking the complete available screen estate. By that it is similar to the previous Alt+Tab mode inside the Present Windows Effect. The code related to Alt+Tab has been removed from the effect, but otherwise the effect is of course unchanged.

Having this mode as a QML layout has quite some advantages. E.g. it is no longer required to have desktop effects enabled, though it is still recommended 🙂 The layout follows the visual style of our primary Desktop Shell which makes it easier to use. Selection is indicated by the well known selection marker of the Desktop Shell Themeing. Last but not least the layout properly supports multiple screens, which has not been a pleasant experience with the old effect based implementation.

Overall the new grid layout is also incorporating some of the feedback we received for the new layouts introduced in 4.8. Our default layout replaced the BoxSwitch effect, but there has been a slight difference in behavior. The layout makes only use of the horizontal space and by that thumbnails can become so small that they cannot be recognized any more. In the new QML based layout the thumbnails always have the same size at the compromise that some of them are perhaps not visible.

A grid based layout provides here quite some advantages as the screen estate is used in a more efficient way to render high quality and good looking thumbnails even with a large amount of windows.

I like to remember that we are currently selecting ideas on how to improve our default settings and switching to the grid based layout may be one of those. Also I want to remember that all those changes are rather trivial and could easily be implemented by new contributors and are also listed in our ideas page and as milestones for 4.9.

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What Feature Requests Can Tell Us

As mentioned yesterday I am currently going through all open feature requests for KWin. This of course tells me quite a lot about what our users want to see in KWin and where we have rough edges. Of course everything there has to be seen with some bias as some reports are really old and KWin has done a transition from being a window manager to a compositor and window manager. Given the age of KWin there has also been a dramatic shift in the targeted user audience of KWin and Linux in general.

One of the patterns I noticed in going through the requests is a high demand for our window specific rules framework. In fact I noticed so many requests for them, that I decided to create an own bug component for bugs and requests specific to the rules framework. This shows that the scripting capabilities currently added to KWin are useful and that there are many users who will appreciate that work.

Another area which has quite a rather large amount of wishes is Present Windows and Desktop Grid. This validates my assumption that it is one of the most powerful features we actually have for window management and that we have to make this more prominent. Personally I have quite some ideas to improve this in 4.10.

On the other hand there are hardly any requests for our other effects and if at all it is for accessibility features. When we introduced desktop effects there were many requests to add this effect and that effect, mostly with the reason that compiz has it, too. The more fancy, the better. Lately we have hardly got any new wishes for adding more eye candy. This quite validates some assumptions I already had. As desktop effects are quite normal nowadays on all systems there seems to be no need any more to have the show off effects. Who wants to burn down windows anymore? That was awesome back in 2005 as no other system could do something like that, but nowadays it looks already quite old fashioned.

Another area which really sticks out are advanced window management features like Focus Follows Mouse, Focus Under Mouse or Window Shading. Concepts probably not known to most users, concepts dating back to the early times of X11 and not really used by our current developers. If I think back to the developer sprints I have been over the last years I have not noticed anyone who used Window Shading.

Overall the feature request highlight something I expected before: feature requests are only reported by very advanced users. Only a very small sub group of our user base is able to report them. And that is no surprise. In most cases we can safely assume that a user of the KDE Plasma Workspaces does not know anything about KDE. Even if she does it is unlikely that she knows anything about KWin (try to find the word KWin in our UI). Even if the name KWin is known it is unlikely that a user knows that she could report a bug or feature request. KWin does not have a Help menu with a “Report Bug…” entry. So there is a huge entry barrier for reporting feature requests.

It shows again that bugzilla is hardly useful for interaction with the userbase as your userbase is not represented correctly. For KWin this will of course be fixed by no longer accepting feature requests in the bug tracker, but sending users to the brainstorm section.

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Changing the Feature Request Workflow for KWin

As a reader of my blog you should know that I am rather unhappy with the situation of our bug tracker. Last week there was an incident with our bug tracker which should not have happened: the upgrade of our bugzilla installation broke the automatic submission of crash reports through DrKonqui. Given the stats for KWin of last year, I have to admit that I was not unhappy about it. My first expectation was that for at least a month we would not get any new crash reports and probably none for outdated versions ever again. Now our sysadmins and DrKonqui developers rock and have already fixed the issue 🙂

Nevertheless I took this incident as a motivating factor to start a cleanup of our bug tracker. Not getting new bugs and having to set them to duplicate frees some resources to go through the existing reports. At the time of this writing KWin went down 48 bugs and 160 feature requests over the last seven days.

During this work I concentrated on cleaning up the feature request. In the past the assumption was that each feature request is valid. Of course users may wish new features. Nothing wrong about that. Unfortunately this results in more than 350 feature requests and the oldest ones being reported against KDE 2.0. Well if a feature request has been reported more than ten years ago and nobody has thought about implementing it, we come to the point where we should consider facing the reality and stating that we won’t implement it. From the request I went through there were things which would have required a rewrite of KWin, many features which had been implemented or implemented in a slightly different way, just really bad ideas and many wishes for additions where we just don’t have the time for.

For the future I want to see new workflows established concerning feature request for KWin. First of all feature requests should not be entered in the bug tracker but on the brainstorm section of our forums. This allows other users to vote on the idea giving us developers a better understanding whether the feature is really wanted or just fixing a corner case of one user.

As a result feature requests in the bug tracker should only be there if we plan to implement them. For this I started to introduce “target milestones” for version 4.9 and 4.10 and started to flag the requests I consider as useful with these milestones. Feature requests which I consider as useful but cannot be implemented right now were made dependent on other feature requests which are already targeted for a specific release.

This will also change my own workflow for developing KWin. All the features I work on will end up as tasks in the bug tracker. Currently the ideas are either only in my head or as sticky notes on my whiteboard. Both is not a good solution for doing development planning and tracking dependencies between the tasks or verifying that all tasks get implemented before the feature freeze. But from my own experience I know that bugzilla is very capable of doing exactly that work.

For establishing such a workflow for myself it is of course necessary to first clean up the feature request. But in the end this gives everybody advantages. I have a better managed todo list which is shared with everyone. Given the target milestones all users and possible developers can see what (list is not yet complete) will end up in the release or where help is required.

Changing my own workflow is also quite important as I can manage my own available development time much better. Since November I have reduced my day job to have more time for KDE and started to do consulting work around KDE on the weekdays I have not been at my day job. Since recently I also belong to the group of developers working for the Netrunner OS distribution and since March the BlueSystems, the company behind Netrunner OS, is sponsoring two days a week for KDE development. Thanks a lot for the trust in the KDE community.

Now to something completely different: I not only worked hours through the bugtracker but have also been one day on a development sprint for Plasma Active. We had very good discussions about various aspects of the development of our workspaces 🙂 I used the short train journey to Darmstadt to rebase my JavaScript bindings for KWin Effects on current master with the result that yesterday I merged them into master. It still needs some final adjustments and documentation, but overall I’m quite happy about it. I remember that I talked about the ideas for the first time last year at the sprint before Plasma Active was announced and I think it is just a nice coincidence that I added the finishing touch to this work one year later on the way to and fro the Plasma Active sprint.

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Default Options Projects for KWin 4.9

For our next release I want to improve the default options of KWin. For me it is very difficult to find good default options as I have adjusted KWin to fit my personal needs very well, so I need your help.

If you have ideas for better default options please post them in our Wiki on the Default Options page. Everybody can participate, all you need is a 4.8 installation of the KDE Plasma Workspaces.

You can also use the Wiki page to comment on some suggested changes and best is if you are able to open a review request for your change 🙂

Just as a small reminder: if you want to help the KWin development team you can also checkout our ideas.

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On Getting Help for KWin and Helping KWin

Let me start this post with a big THANK YOU to our sysadmins and web designers for the awesome job on upgrading bugs.kde.org. The new design looks really great and the new bugzilla version brings some quite nice features. I really like the improved reports page and the HTML mails (although I normally never use HTML mails).

Currently a huge topic in the KWin channel is about providing help. Pablo has done a great job on documenting the Window Specific Rules. Luca from KDE Forum team asked me for a collection of things we could ask users to provide when providing support. I realized that this can be difficult, but that KWin itself knows everything which would help during support. So I added a d-bus and KWin Scripting call to print out support information.

qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin supportInformation

or 

print(workspace.supportInformation())

prints out a wonderful summary of the current state of KWin including used options, used compositing backend and relevant OpenGL driver capabilities. We plan to make this information even more accessible by adding it to our “useractions” menu.

For those who need help on writing KWin Scripts, I updated the KWin Scripting Tutorial to match the new API as used in 4.9. The example used in this tutorial got also updated in the kde-examples git repository. You will soon find there more examples: I intend to submit all the example code I write to test the API to this repository. The declarative scripting support has been merged into master and I intend to finalize the JavaScript bindings for KWin Effects this week.

But we do not only provide help, we also need more helping hands. And luckily we also get help. Just today I pushed a commit of a new contributor who refactored our inclusion checks for windows in the window switcher. Thanks a lot to Stefano for this great work.

Of course I have many more ideas for where KWin could be improved and I also have many ideas for small tasks a new KWin developer could solve (of course with mentoring), so I wrote them down in our community wiki. If you always wanted to contribute something to KWin, check out our Ideas and claim one for work. If you have any questions about one of the ideas feel free to contact us on IRC or mailing list.

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How we could use Bugzilla for User Support

On the kde-core-devel mailinglist we currently have a very interesting discussion about how we use our bugzilla installation and in general user support. The first interesting thing to notice is that there are different developer groups who have different expectations from bugzilla and who see it being used differently.

  1. library developers: users of libraries are developers. Bug reports are useful and have a high level of entropy. In general the developers would like to have reporting bugs as easy as possible. Examples are KDE frameworks
  2. developers of advanced applications: the user group is very specific and the user base is quite experienced. The amount of bug reports is still rather small and reports are very useful to the product. Examples are Krita and to a certain degree KDE PIM
  3. developers of end user applications: large number of bug reports and most bug reports are user support issues. The entropy is very low and it is very difficult for the developers to find useful information and to fix actual bugs. Examples: Plasma Desktop and KWin

From these three developer groups we can recognize that there are different expectations on what bugzilla is used for: developer tool vs. end-user support tool. From the discussion it seems so far that all groups want to have bugzilla as a developer tool, but that the first two groups also consider it to be a user support tool.

Bugzilla is no end user support tool

For KWin our bugzilla installation is actually abused as an end-user support tool and given what we see I don’t think that bugzilla is suited for end-user support.

  • Successful solved problems cannot be marked as that. It is not a “fixed” bug, but in fact an “invalid” bug.
  • Users cannot find their issue as successful solved issues would be marked as “invalid”
  • user interface is too technical for user support, e.g. “severity”, “priority”, etc.
  • useful information is hidden in mess of useless information, e.g. duplication notices
  • moderation is not possible
  • user interface is tailored towards a defects management system
  • crash information hide the workarounds to prevent crashes
  • release announcements state how many bugs have been resolved
  • …

Given that I think we should make sure that user support issues do not end up in the bug tracker. It’s nothing the users want to use. Given the bugs we have in KWin I see that users think that they found a bug, but in fact it’s just a user support issue. We have to bring users to the right tool to solve their problems without introducing more work for the developers.

First, Second and Third level support

At the first stage for end-user support we need (and have) a working first level support system. This can and should be distributed over many channels like forums, mailinglists, IRC channels and maybe even phone support. First level supporters take care about the issue and help the user. Many problems can be solved directly – e.g. by telling them which option to set.

In case the first level support is unable to solve the problem the second level support has to be involved. The second level support verifies that the first level support tried everything to solve the problem. If that is the case the second level support investigates whether there is a real issue (aka bug) and whether it is already known on the bugtracker. If it is not the case the second level support informs the third-level support about the issue by opening a bug report.

The third-level support are the actual developers. They have a look at the issue and verify whether this is a bug or not. If it is a bug they accept the bug report and inform the user about it in the initial first level support tool that the development department took over the issue.

If it is not a bug the third level supporters provide the required information and pass the issue back to the second level support. These supporters use the provided information to update the documentation for the first level support so that if the problem arises again it is well documented and the first level support knows how to handle it without involving the first level support.

How this could be implemented?

In my opinion the best tool for first level support is a forum, which we already have and which works quite well. The second level support is mostly missing. A way to inform second level support needs to be introduced. This could be done by having a tool to create a bug report from a user support thread assigned to the second level support.

In this bug report the second level support can handle the work task oriented. If they need to involve the third level support they just inform them by setting a flag. The third level support can then investigate the issue and in case there is a real bug they open a bug report for this specific task and block the support report for it.

Advantages of the approach

The biggest advantage is that the developers only get real bug reports and each bug report has all the required information as the report is in fact created by the developers. Only valid bug reports will enter the system.

In general the bugtracker will be used more task oriented: one task for investigation, one task for fixing the bug and so on. Bugzilla is very suited for such work as it is possible to add flags, introduce bug dependencies and if required duplicate bugs. It would allow us to use bugzilla to manage our work which is currently not possible.

The users would always be informed about the state of their support request. They would get the feedback that their problem is under further investigation, that a defect support has been created, that it has been fixed. It would be a much more transparent process for the user.

As there is always the feedback to the second level support state the end user and first level support documentation would get updated increasing our quality not only in the software but also in the documentation.

Disadvantages of the Approach

The biggest disadvantage is clearly that this would result in a closed bug tracker. For many people involved in free software an open bug tracker is the ultimate tool. Here I think the advantages for all users are overwhelming and the closed down bug tracker is a small price to pay.

Another disadvantage is that it requires creating multiple bug reports and re-entering data for the same issue. Again I think it’s a small price to pay especially if we go to a task oriented approach and have everything nicely linked.

I hope to see a nice discussion in the comment section of my blog post. Hopefully many people see the advantage in this and I would love to try such a new issue tracking workflow for KWin as an experiment for the complete KDE community.