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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Volunteering to port Kooka to KDE4
From:       Jonathan Marten <jjm2 () keelhaul ! demon ! co ! uk>
Date:       2009-10-16 21:03:55
Message-ID: ovws2vt5j8.fsf () keelhaul ! local
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Eduard Huguet <eduardhc@gmail.com> writes:
> I'd like to know if there is any possibility to start porting Kooka
> project to KDE4 on my own. I've been watching the Kooka project page
> lately (http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Kooka), but it seems that
> the project is currently stuck in a "slept" state for some time
> yet...

Good to hear from you Eduard.  A timely message, showing that porting
offers are like buses - you wait for ages and then several come along
at once...

I must admit that I'd let development on the KDE3 version stall for a
while, for no other reason than it had got to a fairly stable and
usable state.  Two areas that I'd been intending to address are the
dock window user interface (particularly unreliable) and a move to
Skanlite's scanning library (libksane).  There was no point in trying
to do these in the KDE3 version, though, so the KDE4 port would have
to come first.

Currently I'm in the process of porting libkscan and Kooka to KDE4,
with the intention of doing a straightforward conversion before
attempting any major internal changes - if there are to be any, these
will be easier to do when the basic application is working.  Just this
morning I finished the last class conversion and got an executable,
which promptly crashed... so there is some work to do.

I'd been intending to create a new SVN work branch as soon as the
basic application was working, but if others are interested in the
code then I can do that now so that anyone else interested can at
least use it as a base.

Other major porting areas are the migration of K3 and Q3 classes,
printing and DBUS (there wasn't any DCOP in the original, but remote
control of a scanner would be most useful).  Assistance with these
from anyone would be most welcome!

> I'm aware of the existence of the Skanlite project, but however I
> consider that Kooka is, right now, a fairly superior scanning
> application for KDE that it's really worth the effort of migrating
> it.

But even if we want to keep the Kooka GUI, it would be of benefit
(i.e. a single scanning library, 16-bit scanner support) to convert
Kooka to use libksane.  Currently the libkscan library is a mess of
GUI, scanner interfacing and image handling all together.

> How should I proceed? I have some background in general Qt3 and Qt4
> developing (including porting issues), and general experience
> working with KDE API. I'm well aware of the difficulty of the
> process, but nevertheless I'd like to at least try to do it (can't
> promise any results, though...)  Best regards,   Eduard Huguet

If you could hang on for a while, I'll get a KDE4 development branch
set up and push what I have at the moment to it - no guarantees that
anything will work though!  Things that you could work on at the
moment in your source base, while awaiting that, are printing or
porting of uses of Q3ButtonGroup/Q3GroupBox/Q3ScrollView - these are
the main areas where I've just used the compatibility classes or
commented out for now.

> PS: I've started by taking the original source code from Kooka site
> and converting it to use CMake build system instead of
> Autotools. Currently I've just started migrating classes, but I just
> prefer to announce it here just in case anyone is also trying to do
> it, or else this could cause any kind of imaginable  trouble...

Many thanks for your message and your offer, apologies again for
allowing things to stay dormant for so long.  If you are interested,
there is certainly work to be done!

Regards, Jonathan
(Current Kooka maintainer)

-- 
Jonathan Marten                         http://www.keelhaul.demon.co.uk
Twickenham, UK                          jjm2@keelhaul.demon.co.uk
 
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