KDE Accepted To Google Summer of Code 2015

jrepin writes The KDE student programs team is happy to announce that KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2015. This will allow students from around the world to work with mentors on KDE software projects. Successful students will receive stipends from Google. Ideas on what a student entering Google Summer of Code 2015 with KDE might work on are listed on the Community Wiki.

Comments

WOW!

[Grindalf]

Oh man! That's awesome!

Re:What about the 136 other Organizations Accepted

[Kjella]

Looks like they jumped over an inch high bar, yes. The requirements pretty much seem to be:

1) Do you use an OSI approved license?
2) Do you have ideas for improvement?
3) Can you provide mentors?
4) Are you a somewhat popular, established project?

Then you're good. I mean there's many obscure mentoring organizations there I've never heard about.

Re:What about the 136 other Organizations Accepted

[Anonymous Coward]

GCC, please move out of the way for clang. Sundar's got the reigns, Larry and sergay are too senile drunk with money to run the company anymore. you got a fat belly of middle managers.

KDE and GSoC

[Peter H.S.]

There are several very good projects on the Wiki page. My favourites are probably:

Project: Port Amarok to Qt5/Kf5/Plasma5: Something I use every day.

Project: Port KSystemLog to use journald as a backend: With systemd it is actually possible to make a distro agnostic GUI log viewer that isn't just a "less" with windows decorations. I like using the CLI "journalctl", but a GUI, perhaps with some log watch support and real time panel notifications about "syslog level: Error" events and above would be nice.

Project: Implement PDF Poppler features: I like Okular very much, so more features like linearized pdf support would be nice.

Re:KDE and GSoC

[Grishnakh]

Your comment here is entirely out-of-place. Look around: yours is only one of two which isn't a troll.

This site has really, completely gone down the tubes, and this article really shows it more than ever before.

Re:KDE and GSoC

[Peter H.S.]

It would just be an optional KDE module; KDE already have a rather excellent GUI for configuring systemd (Kcmsystemd) that works as an optional control panel module.

Re:KDE and GSoC

[Grishnakh]

(That's my complaint with systemd anyway - it violates the Unix principle of being portable and compatible).

How is that a problem with systemd? Which other UNIX system still uses sysvinit anyway? Solaris moved to SMF ages ago, OSX certainly doesn't use it, the BSDs don't use it (since they're not related to System V UNIX to begin with), etc.

Has anyone tried porting SMF to Linux? If not, then that isn't exactly portable either.

Re:KDE and GSoC

[armanox]

Has anyone tried porting SMF to Linux? If not, then that isn't exactly portable either.

An interesting thought, but I do not believe that anyone has tried it because of it being CDDL instead of GPL. Those GPL advocates are pretty damn picky about what software you're allowed to use. Also the same reason we do not have launchd on Linux (which people also decried as anti-Unix, for the record).

The GPL people believe in freedom: Freedom to use what they tell you.

Re: KDE and GSoC

[Grishnakh]

That's the most idiotic thing I've ever read about UNIX, ever, hands-down. No one has switched to Linux because of its init system. Are you really that stupid?

Re:What about the 136 other Organizations Accepted

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, really an only inch high bar!

That is why Mozilla, Tor and others were rejected!

http://blog.queze.net/post/2015/03/03/Mozilla-not-accepted-for-Google-Summer-of-Code-2015

Re:Relevance to Systemd?

[SeaFox]

KDE is the desktop environment of Kubuntu, which is a variant of Ubuntu, which will soon be switching to systemd.

See? That wasn't so hard.

Re:What about the 136 other Organizations Accepted

[joelsherrill]

I am pretty sure over 50% of the organizations that apply are not accepted in any given year.

The requirements you list are minimum ones. Speaking as an organization administrator for GSoC (and ESA SOCIS), there is a lot of work that must be done so an organization can do a good job with students. The ideas must be summer-sized projects with clear goals. You want an easy on-ramp for new developers with a welcoming community. You realistically need multiple mentors per student, to be responsive to those students, and to track them so they don't fall into a pit. You are also responsible for helping them set realistic mid-term and final goals that they can be evaluated against.

And this ignores helping promote the program, recruit students, and try to keep the students involved in your organization or free software in general after the summer is over.

If you haven't mentored or been an organization administrator for GSoC, then you don't know how seriously all organizations take being able to be prepared and do a good job for their students. The IRC meeting with discussions on why some organizations didn't make it this year is at: http://infobot.rikers.org/%23g.... It starts at 16:00. Not sure how much detail they got into. I just did a quick scan.

Re:No thanks.

[Wootery]

Oh come on. Slashdot deserves better trolling than this.

Re:The Summer of Systemd

[Wootery]

I can't speak on behalf of KDE, but: it's not likely. It's lacking that vital 'k'.

Throw together a C++ wrapper whose name kontains a 'k', and maybe it'll happen.

Re:Relevance to Systemd?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have not understood why Systemd has binary logs why is it so hard to have human readable logs?

Re:The Summer of Systemd

[unrtst]

How can KDE shed some of its bloat by using some of the services and API provided by Systemd?

I thought this was meant to be a joke. Then I looked at the list of suggested ideas, and this is the second one:
Project: Port KSystemLog to use journald as a backend
https://community.kde.org/GSoC...

Granted, I didn't see any others in the large number of other suggestions. Still a bit of a coincidence.

Re:Relevance to Systemd?

[armanox]

Forget systemd - KDE is a common desktop choice on AIX and FreeBSD. The fact that it is much more Unix friendly then GNOME is a talking point in and of itself.

Plasma 5 is awesome

[sayfawa]

Only slightly on-topic, but I've been using KDE plasma 5 since 5.2 came out. And it's great. I was a refugee escaping from Gnome 3 who went to XFCE for a few years. But that never completely satisfied me.

But KDE does now. Which is funny, because in the days of Gnome 2, I really didn't like KDE.

Re:Plasma 5 is awesome

[spauldo]

Same here, actually.

I played with KDE back before GNOME started. It was OK, and for non-geeks that was the desktop I set up. My girlfriend at the time had no issues with it. I was bouncing between Enlightenment, FVWM, and Afterstep at the time.

The GNOME started up, and I switched to it back when it was barely there - 0.20 or something. Officially, Enlightenment was their reccomended WM, but it worked with almost anything. I ran it under TWM for kicks once. Painful...

Fast forward, and GNOME just started getting less and less to my liking. The "usability experts" Sun was providing kept wanting to dumb everything down and remove configurability. GNOME switched from E to Sawmill (later Sawfish), which required you to learn some obscure dialect of Lisp to configure. Then it switched to Metacity - the "our way or the highway" window manager. I said screw it and went back to FVWM and stayed there for about a decade (Enlightenment had gotten weird, with their pull-down desktops and whatnot, and I wasn't into that at all).

Fast forward again to about six months ago. I was getting off the road (I was a truck driver) and going to do some development work out of the house. I built a nice beefy machine and tried running Mint with the Cinnamon desktop (getting a non-DE setup like FVWM working with polkit and all the other stuff is a nightmare). After about a month, I noticed my workflow was exactly the same as when I was forced to use Windows. So, I decided to give KDE a try...

And WOW. It's great. I've got usable desktop switching - something I've only experienced in the older WMs. Move the mouse to the edge of the screen (any edge, my desktops are in a 3x3 configuration) and it works great. Cinnamon could do it, but it was practially unusable (and limited to horizontal desktops, IIRC), and most other modern DE can't do it at all. Everything I want to configure is configurable.

The only complaint I have is that every time it starts, I have to load my .Xdefaults file. No biggie. I know I can turn off the option for that, but that same option also configures GTK apps, which I _do_ want to happen. I restart maybe once every two or three months, so it's not a big thing for me.

My laptop still runs FVWM, and probably will until it dies. It's my primary work machine, ironically enough - I'm not productive at home. I admit I will miss the absolute configurability you get with FVWM, but I'm old enough now that spending hours honing my .fvwmrc to perfection just isn't as appealing as it once was.

(Completely unrelated to this but marginally related to the topic: Blender got rejected by GSOC for the first time in 10 years. I'm kinda bummed about that.)

Akonadi

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Maybe rthey can pay students yo remove it.

KDEConnect

[Teun]

Very happy to see KDEConnect!
I hope they'll also have a look at the issues with KDM running under systemd because LightDM is not everyone's choice.

Although, Plasma5 replaces KDM with SDDM which does work with systemd.

Re:KDE will soon require systemd on linux

[yokljo]

No, it wont. Everything in KDE is optional, even Systemd. Unfortunately if you want to use Kwin on Wayland it will require Systemd, but that is not the fault of KDE developers.

Re:Huh?

[nightsky30]

And then this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re: Huh?

[ZorglubZ]

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.