Last weekend I have been taking part in this years Calligra sprint, which once again was at the Linuxhotel in Essen. This year we had something special as the sprint was actually happening in two places at the same time. While one part of the team was in Essen, the other part of the team meet in Bangalore. This was simply due to the problem that we could only fly a limited number of people around the globe. Both meetings were connected via Google Hangout which worked reasonably well, except for some microphone problems.Another nice additions was that we also had a kitchen, where Thorsten and Arjen cooked lots of pasta andsauces.

Calligra track

Most of the time in the general Calligra track was spent on discussing upcoming changes and technologies. With many new upcoming Qt 5 mobile plattforms the mobile Calligra version are getting more and more important. For Calligra as a whole we have to change the way how we integrate the UI with the rest of the applications and which libraries we want to use or not use.

One of the big technologies that that KOffice 1.x was build around is KParts. It was used to embed documents into other documents, to embed the application in Konqueror and much more. Over time many of these usecases have been solved differently or are becoming far less common than they used to be while at the same time it has been making more and more trouble. So our long is to replace KParts in the future. As a one possibility to a new framework Friedrich presented his Kasten framwork.Altogether this will need a lot of time to complete, but will result in a much better architecture.

Beside these big topic there are were many smaller discussion around topics like QML user interface, more focus on testing and an a development process where we created stable snapshots of the master branch. There are also some interesting developments on things annotation and docx export.

A bit sad was the discussion around unmaintained applications. After some maintainers got busy with life recently some application are unmaintained and see no further development at the moment. This is not a very surprising development as we have been working with a bus factor of 1 for years on these applications.Affected by this are Karbon, Plan and Braindump. We decided that for now the applications will get a splashscreen that informs about the unmaintained state, but still stay as part of the official release. Unless new maintainers step up, these application look towards an uncertain future.

Krita BOF

Beside the Calligra discussion we also had a BOF with the Krita developers, which actually took place over all three days. Krita development is running really well and we are more and more popular in areas outside the usual open source community. Boud reported about presenting Krita Sketch at Mobile World Congress and some news from the VFX world. I did already know that Krita was used in visual effects, but so far didn’t know …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE