KOffice.org

By boudewijn

Last Week in Krita is quite a success, whenever I get a chance to update it, so it seemed like a good idea to do the same for KOffice: keep everyone who is interested, developers, contributors, users — everyone — up to date on what is happening in the KOffice community. I don’t promise it will be exactly every week that I will post these updates, but like for Krita, I will try to do it really often. Me, by the way, is Boudewijn Rempt. I’ve been a KOffice developer since 2003, Krita maintainer since 2004, I’ve been release dude until Cyrille Berger took over the baton.

So, without further ado, hot from the sprint: what is happening in KOffice!

Sprint

The KOffice community tries to join up twice to year for some intensive face to face hacking, discussions and socializing. The first sprint of this year was in Essen Horst, in the wonderful Linux Hotel. Now this is an environment that does a hacker good! Sunshine, free soft drinks, beer and wine, a lawn, a cosy dining room, a great hack room, wonderful bedrooms, great connectivity and quite close to Deventer, where I live. Not that that is the most important thing, but it is easy to reach.

There were slightly under twenty people. Friday was mostly socializing and some patch review. Saturday was tough: we had a meeting from 9:00 AM to 18:00 PM with only a break for pizza. Sunday again was a day for hacking, and for discussing smaller items.

You can read the meeting minutes on the developer wiki. The minutes are very rough, so I’ll present the gist of it here.

First, we honestly and fearlessly recognized that despite the recent spate of KPresenter love, we don’t have many users for KOffice. We even discussed whether we care about having lots of users, because that might conflict with a desire to hack for fun, which is a valid goal for a free software project.

It’s not even impossible that FreOffice, the KOffice-based Office Viewer for Maemo, has almost as many as the desktop version of KOffice, if we consider KPresenter, KSpread and KWord. Two sessions were devoted to this issue: first we spent identifying reasons for the lack of users, and secondly we created a list of high-priority missing features. Some things have already started being implemented, like a draft for a good page about downloading/installing KOffice. Other things are much more long term. And people don’t use stagnant software, so we’ve started, well, this series of articles.

Second, with equal candour we asked ourselves why so many parts of KOffice have so few developers. This is a big worry: while there are some 40 regular contributors, there are also many components. Applications like Kivio have been dormant for ages. Karbon has been a one-man show for years. KPlato ditto. And while the number of developers has grown, it is mostly because people are paid directly or indirectly to fix issues in KOffice that are vital to make the mobile variant a success. Here, too, we didn’t plug our heads in the sand ostrich-wise, but came up with a list of recommendations. The first issue, the sometimes rather difficult patch review process has been made explicit and streamlined. Another thing is that people don’t get interested in hacking on something that’s perceived as dormant, we hope this series of articles will get people interested. Read the minutes for the full, rather unedited, list.

Thirdly, we were wondering about platforms and portability. And not just portability between Windows, X11 and OSX — though that has its own challenges — but by making it possible to have different interfaces on top of the KOffice engine. Right now, FreOffice uses KOffice internally, but has a custom interface. In the future, we might want to put a web frontend on top of KOffice, running the engine in a server. Or something else altogether. A promising platform where KOffice could play a role is Meego, for instance, were KOffice could provide services to apps. We’ve been hacking on KOffice for more than ten years, and would like our work to remain relevant in the future. So this issue is vital, and everyone present committed to making KOffice much more portable and reusable. Nokia is a great help here and have promisted to document all the issues they had when putting a new face on top of the KOffice engine.

This really was the most important part of the Saturday discussions, and it can be summarized as:

• 2.3 is for users. Let’s make it so!
• we want to make it fun to hack on KOffice
• KOffice should go places!

Of course, everyone prefers hacking to discussing, and Sunday we had some good technical discussions and equally good hacking! Not to mention pizza on the lawn! This was easily the most positive, productive and fun KOffice sprint in years. And like usual, we even forgot to toast to the release of 2.2!

Thanks go to the KDE e.V. and its sponsors for sponsoring this sprint and to Alexandra Leisse and Inge Wallin for organizing it!

Summer of Code

Six people are working on KOffice Google Summer of Code projects. Cyril and Marc have had a slow start: both have had some projects and exams to finish. But Cyril has already been bugfixing and Marc has started for real this week. Cyril is working on a mindmapping application, while Marc is creating a transform tool for Krita.

Adam Celarek has committed the first version of his new color selection dockers. These are also useful in Karbon and KPresenter. Pentalis and Dmitry’s work is more deeply focussed on Krita agin. Both have been committing like mad!

Bad News about Karbon

Karbon is one of the little-known jewels of KOffice. It’s a full-featured vector drawing application with support for SVG and ODG. There is all kinds of cool stuff — even filters on vector objects are possible. I’m a raster kind of guy, so my vector foo is extremely limited, but people tell me that it is very usable — it performs well, has the right features and usability-wise it’s quite good. And after the initial development by Rob Buis last century, it was mostly developed by one person: Jan Hambrecht.

However, Jan has had to stop his involvement in KOffice, so Karbon is the third orphaned application in KOffice, after Kivio and KFormula. And this application is really cool and a lot of fun to hack on! So, if anyone is seeking fame eternal and a really cool hobby, don’t hesitate to contact the KOffice developers on #koffice on freenode.not, the forums or the koffice-devel mailing list.

Next…

Next week I’ll start doing an overview of code changes as well.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 21:21 and is filed under Last Week in KOffice, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.