FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Kevin Kofler]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> * Proper integration of NetworkManager. KDE currently is using
> NetworkManager-gnome which doesn't integrate well with KDE

The plan is to default to kde-plasma-networkmanagement in F12. As we had
agreed in the KDE SIG meetings, I'll be flipping the switch in Rawhide soon
(but I was hoping we could get the WPA regressions from F10 to F11 sorted
out first... it's really weird because the reporter says the exact same
kde-plasma-networkmanagement snapshot is working on F10 and not on F11 and
we haven't figured out yet what changed).

> * KPackageKit doesn't do mime, font or codec integration like
> gpk-application does and is generally in a more broken state. Clicking
> on a downloaded RPM used to fail in Fedora 11 GA.  No support for
> creating service packs either in KPackageKit

The bugs with downloaded RPMs are indeed something we need to sort out if
they're still happening. Unfortunately, I don't have the latest KPackageKit
installed because I only have F9 and F10 at the moment, so I can't test if
it's fixed already.

For everything else, those are completely optional features, they aren't
required at all to provide a working system. In fact, some people even
consider the auto-installation stuff annoying, I've seen blog posts
describing how to disable those "annoyances". I'm personally also sceptical
about the usefulness of prompting for e.g. fonts. The app should just
display the text using the fonts which are available on the system. If they
can't display the alphabet, most likely that means the user doesn't speak
the language(s) written in it anyway. I don't need something prompting me
to install a hieroglyph font to display that spam mail in Ancient Egyptian
I won't understand anyway. ;-)

> * For good codec integration, you need gstreamer to be the default.
> Phonon gstreamer backend doesn't seem to be as mature as the Xine
> backend yet.

Actually, the plan is to default to Phonon-GStreamer in F12, and in fact
Rawhide already does. The RH folks (than, ltinkl and jreznik) assured me
they tested Phonon-GStreamer and it worked perfectly for them.

That said, xine-lib also just works and it doesn't need special magic for
codec installation because all the "evil" codecs are in a single package
(xine-lib-extras-freeworld) unlike GStreamer's 3 (gstreamer-plugins-ugly,
gstreamer-plugins-bad and gstreamer-ffmpeg). But Phonon-GStreamer is
worthwhile for other reasons.

> * Solid needs a proper DeviceKit backend and that needs to be followed
> up with integration of libatasmart et all.

A DeviceKit backend for Solid is also being worked on for F12 (ltinkl is
working on it). In the meantime HAL just works. Sure, moving over to
DeviceKit is important in the long run to stop relying on deprecated APIs
and to be able to add some new features, but it hurts nobody to be one
release late with it.

> * GDM integrates better with Plymouth via plymouth-gdm-hooks package

That just eliminates a single screen blinking, hardly an essential feature!

> * No support for fingerprint readers in KDM

GDM didn't support them either before F11. Nobody died from it.

Work is ongoing on this too, it may land in F12 or F12 updates. See:
http://blog.djaara.net/wordpress/2009/
(That guy (Jaroslav Barton) is a student in Brno who is working with ltinkl
and jreznik.) There's also a GSoC project with Pardus for implementing
this, so we may even end up with a second, competing implementation... But
judging from the blog posts, the Brno one seems to be working already!

So, most of the stuff you mention will be fixed really soon, probably
already in F12! But there are also plenty of KDE features GNOME doesn't
have (e.g. where's a GNOME desktop globe matching Marble?). It's perfectly
normal that some features are not available at the same time in both
desktops. That has nothing to do with system integration.

        Kevin Kofler