The Power of Developer Meetings

Since several years, we have lots of small developer meetings in the KDE project, gratefully supported by the KDE e.V. There, developers of a certain project (e.g. KMail/kdepim, Plasma, you name it) meet to discuss further plans and to push the project further. From experience we can tell that those meetings are really beneficial in several ways:

• Social aspect: You get to know the other developers involved in the project in real life, which is a great motivation factor. This also happens at KDE’s annual conference Akademy, although there are a lot more people.
• Productivity: Since you are sitting next to each other discussions about how to do what are very focused. It’s amazing how quickly a project can evolve this way. (I haven’t seen such focused work in companies, yet. I guess the variance in the knowledge of people involved is higher. And the motivation is usually very different).
• Knowledge Transfer: Since participants are experts in different areas, discussions lead to knowledge transfer. This is essential, as sometimes developers have very few free time to contributes to a project. Spreading the knowledge helps a lot to keep the project alive.
• Steady Contributions: We are always open for new contributors. Just send a patch, get commit access and join development. Experience shows that participants of a developer meeting usually contribute for years to come.

Enough said, here is what happened the last three days in Kate:

• memory optimization: remove unused edit history items
• fix crash in doHighlight due to wrong initialization
• don’t squeeze captions in the window title
• fix crash when using katepart in e.g. konqueror
• kate vi mode improvements
• fix: invalid js commands lead to a crash
• share code snippets between kate and kdevelop
• more syntax highlighting files for asm dialects
• replace: show number of replacements in a passive popup
• new command line command: unwrap
• fix crash when switching sessions with multiple main windows
• fix incorrect global replace %s///g
• fix crash in smart range group handling
• turn search option “highlight all” into the action “find all”
• replace old text snippet plugin with new one
• optimize away nops for text editing
• fixes in the template handler code
• remove pythong browser plugin, since the symbol viewer plugin can do the same and much more
• remove unmaintained html tools plugin, since it was never ported
• optimization for bracket matching
• new text snippet plugin: context aware snippet completion
• fix filtering in the file browser plugin
• always start search&replace from cursor
• developer doumentation for smart range usage
• cstyle indenter: fix indentation of multi-line comments
• update of syntax highlighting for MySQL
• performance optimization in the highlighting system: bug, bug
• fix crash in removeTrailingSpaces, if undo/redo is active
• new interface for getting the mode at a given cursor
• search & replace: lots of code cleanups
• basic regression tests for search, scripting, and more…
• scripting: add support for quoting in command line scripts
• Kate crashes because of spell checking
• fix regression: with auto brackets + selection
• find-in-files: set filter correctly when opening the search
• fix: make reload-scripts work with new functions
• share a KCompletion object between all KateCmdLineEdits

There are even more changes I left out. Most of those changes will be in KDE 4.4.1. If you want to help, join #kate in irc.libera.chat!