[sputnick at quassel-irc.org: Re: Kubuntu and Quassel]

[Jonathan Riddell]

----- Forwarded message from Manuel Sput Nickschas <sputnick at quassel-irc.org> -----

From: Manuel Sput Nickschas <sputnick at quassel-irc.org>
To: Jonathan Riddell <jriddell at ubuntu.com>
Subject: Re: Kubuntu and Quassel
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:50:51 +0200
Cc: devel at quassel-irc.org, kubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com

On Monday 15 June 2009 17:17:07 Jonathan Riddell wrote:

Hi,

as EgS was obviously faster than I in addressing most issues, I will keep my 
reply a bit shorter :) Obviously, I too value collaboration with downstream; 
it gives us a lot of feedback, and of course it also adds motivation.

Concerning the release schedule, I'd expect releasing some 0.5.x release in 
time for Karmic, basically for getting new features into Karmic. We have so 
far maintained a stable 0.4.x branch, which doesn't include new features. 
Obviously, sticking with 0.4 in Karmic wouldn't make much sense for both our 
and your users and for us. 
We have aligned to Kubuntu's release schedule for both 0.3 and 0.4; though we 
won't commit to keeping a 6 month release schedule (meaning that we might 
release new minor versions faster if development is quick enough), we do try 
to hit the deadlines you guys give us, to not be stuck with something obsolete 
for a whole cycle :)

Which features will go into 0.5 until tagging time arrives, I can't predict 
now. Whatever is done until then, I guess :)

Now on to some of the mentioned features, which EgS couldn't answer in 
sufficient detail.

-----------------

> There is no way to send files with DCC.

As EgS already explained, this is not trivial. I'm not sure if we'll manage 
this in time for Karmic.

> It is hard to configure the toolbars, using KDE toolsbars would fix this.

This is on my agenda. I have already played around with that, but KToolBar 
failed to save/restore its settings over restarts. I guess reading apidox 
could help with this ;-) I expect this to be done in time.

> Translations are incomplete for some menu items.

In addition to relying on user- or distro-contributed translations, there are 
also some issues with Qt refusing to translate some strings marked with tr() 
and translated in the .ts. We have yet to investigate that issue. I think we 
can do that until Karmic; nonetheless, we'd need people to provide 
translations.

If Kubuntu hor KDE happen to support us with their translation teams, I'd be 
very happy if those would work with our existing contributors (for existing 
languages), as it would be quite unfair to throw everything away they already 
did, though. Hence, I'd rather see translations being submitted as proper 
patches to our codebase, rather than then being maintained as distro-specific 
enhancements. I think we'd need to find a good workflow for that, in 
particular given the fact that Rosetta doesn't work with Qt translations 
anyway.

Note that we also played around a bit with using gettext instead of linguist. 
There is a branch called "gettext" in our repo. While this would ease work for 
translators considerably, we couldn't get it to work as it should. On some 
systems the gettext-based translation works fine; on others (including mine), 
it doesn't. We might want to revisit that issue (we could talk to 
apachelogger, he was one of the guys working on that back then).

We cannot use the KDE i18n() macro, because Quassel needs to build without 
kdelibs as well.

> The dockwidgets are ugly and draw too many boxes. There is an Amarok patch 
to fix this which could be incorporated 
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/categories/18-freespirit

I didn't get that either (and I'm using KDE) :)

> Links in topic don't look like links. 

That should be fixed one way or another for Karmic. Either we finish the 
planned rewrite in time, or I'll make sure to underline links properly at 
least.

I think I don't have additional comments on the other items on the list. In 
general, for the usability issues on the list, we would very much appreciate 
feedback (suggested workflows, mockups, ...) that helps us Doing It Right[tm]. 
Usually, coding isn't the issue here; but we're no usability experts, and I at 
least am a horrible UI designer, so we are kinda dependent on getting detailed 
feedback from the experts :)

Best regards,
~ Sput
-- 
Manuel "Sputnick" Nickschas ("Sput" on Freenode)                  |  (o<
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