Fading Memories

As Bram notes, Krita still crashes now and then. We did fix most of the performance issues last week, and Krita is unlikely to become any faster before the release. But since the last beta, Krita got about 500 commits; and KOffice as a whole another 1000. KPlato, KSpread, KWord, Kexi, the libraries, KChart, KPresenter. Lots of new code. And as anyone knows, lots of new code means lots of new bugs.

So, fairly unanimously, we decided to do a second beta release and slip the final release until April 11. I do hope the second beta will get a lot of testing: I mean, the first beta was really easy to test thanks to binaries for Debian, Kubuntu and SuSE, not to mention the kliks. Nobody has an excuse for still filing bugs against 1.4.2! Even the first 1.5 beta is much better than the 1.4 series.

And it's really, really, really, really important that users test these packages. Developers do not find bugs: developers seldom have time to actually use what they work on, and developers know the safe path through their code instinctively. And we have only a very limited mix of environments. No ppc, for starters, and a small set of distributions.

So: if you're a user, and if you've had a crash in a Krita beta (or in any other KOffice application, but I'm the guy you need to approach for Krita crashes), please, please, mail me the backtrace. I'll get back to you right speedily and either tell you it's something I just fixed, it's something I'm fixing right now, it's something I will fix soon, or something hard and complicated. If the latter, I'll ask you to file the bug in kde's Bugzilla. I don't need you to look in bugzilla first to check whether it's a known bug, if it is, I'll tell you, and still thank you for your help.

Without your reports, the crashes you experience will in all probability not get fixed: it is entirely probable that neither me, nor the other Krita hackers experience those crashes. You get a crash, you mail me -- and then I can try to fix it. No report, no fix, and crash bug in Krita 1.5. That's the deal.

Note that I do not read web forums, do not regularly check blog comments, hardly ever read usenet and am a lot less available on irc than some time ago -- you need to mail me (or go to bugzilla directly, but I prefer an initial mail), otherwise I will not see your report.

Irina's birthday tends to collide with Fosdem, so I probably won't ever go there. But Bart Coppens went (he's a local guy, after all) and gave a nice presentation which apparently was very well received.

We're busy fixing the last-minute bugs in Krita. Tagging has already been delayed a bit, and we'll probably have to delay some more. It's not like we're in deep trouble, but a list minute optimization that made it possible to load a 5000x5000 image in only a few seconds has quite a few repercussions.

Apparently, Krita shirts are for sale... I vaguely seem to remember someone asking me about it -- whether they could do it, or whether there were any to be had, but I have been so preoccupied lately it never registered. But it looks nicely done, even if it's the old icon. Oh, wait, now I realize -- it's Janet Theobroma's shop. Nice :-).

(Everyone knows about the alt-f2 imdb shortcut in the minicli, right?)

I've just seen one of the less famous Marx Brothers movies Monkey Business, and the last one I had never seen before. And it's a great one. I was in the mood for a good laugh, having had a horrible cold on top of a bronchitis on top of all kinds of worries, and this was the perfect specific.

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Well, we got KOffice 1.5 beta 1 out of the door. With an embarrassing problem, of course, just like with 1.4.2... It turns out that if you compile KOffice with an option called --enable-final the debug display for bidirectional text gets activated. Blue and red lines across, over and between the text in KWord and KPresenter. That got fixed very fast, and updated Debian and Kubuntu packages are being prepared right now. (This is an update: I earlier thought they were ready already, but I was mistaken.)

And, as if getting a release out wasn't strenuous enough, I'm in a kind of very uncertain situation job-wise. Not that I'm going to be out of a job tomorrow or next week or so, but the times are getting rather too interesting at my company. Which is not a restful and relaxed situation at all.

In the meantime, Sander Koning is taking his duty as the Krita documentation czar very seriously. KOffice 1.5 doc freeze is Sunday, but Krita's manual is getting to look very nice.

And I've only got to fix one more filter and then all filters can save and restore their settings. Which means adjustment layers can be saved and loaded, too.

Cyrille Berger has set up a separate Krita plugins project: Krita 1.5 will be released with a development package so you can create plugins outside the Krita development tree. And you can do a lot with plugins in Krita. Scripting is implemented as a plugin, as is color separations. Filters are plugins. Tools are plugins. Paint operations are plugins. File format filters are plugins. Even colormodels are plugins. I'm hoping lots of people will start coding weird and experimental plugins after 1.5 is released.