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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: kscd compilation disabled? (Re: KDE with FreeBSD (status, comments, ramblings))
From:       Dirk Foersterling <milliByte () gmx ! net>
Date:       2000-08-03 9:38:43
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On Wednesday 2000-08-02 Alex Zepeda (jazepeda@pacbell.net) wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, Navindra Umanee wrote:
> 
> Hmm.

To make things a little clearer I might remind you of the fact, that I'm
the current kscd maintainer. I'm also responsible for WorkMan, where
kscd got it's cd audio code from.

> 
> YES I object to including such code in the CVS repository... Workman
> itself is of very questionable quality, and a hacked upon KDE version is

Thanks alot, anyway.

> no better.  And before you say this is not kscd, this is part of libwm
> (libwormkan) a requirement for kscd.  Then look at the "FreeBSD" code that
> incorrectly includes defines for various other BSDs.  Then note that it

If it doesn't work for you: Help me, don't flame me. Or, at least, send
a bug report. Isn't that the usual behaviour?

> needs to be ported to CAM.

CAM?

> My assumption was that the lack of documentation and attention kscdmagic
> was receiving was also shown to the rest of kscd.

I'm very sorry. I'm just trying to find my way through this myself. The
code I know best is the WorkMan code.
I don't like the kscdmagig code, too. But for the reason of continuity, I
decided to upgrade its code instead of removing it. My head also spun
upon this job.


I tell you a little about when and why I got involved in kscd:

Some time after I became the maintainer of WorkMan I recognized that
kscd was based on WorkMan (1.4b3) code. Steven Grimm (original author)
was still mentioned in that dialog with his old and complete e-mail
address. This e-mail address was obsolete, because the ownership of the
hyperion.com domain changed. Steve also forwarded any e-mail concerning
WorkMan to myself.
I also did some improvements on the WorkMan code, so I was going to
contact the kscd maintainer for changing e-mail addresses and some of
the code. This discussion ended without any results (I don't want to
work it out here in detail).

Some KDE versions and snapshots later, I found out that kscd still looks
and behaves the same. Still having the knowledge on how to solve some of
the books, I contaced one the new kscd maintainer. This time, I got the
offer to change it myself. I didn't know very much about Qt and KDE
programming very well (only did the remote control for KPresenter in
http://ls7-www.cs.uni-dortmund.de/bodytalk/) but I took that offer,
because I knew how to solve lots of problems and bugs by just working on
the WorkMan code. If you remember the huge list of kscd bugs, you can
easily verify that I did.

As you mentioned earlier, ther _is_ lack of documentation in the kscd
code. It keeps me from going on quickly myself. Some of the kscd code is
really bad in my eyes (including libwm, but my advantage is that I know
the libwm code). I'm on the way to change this.

There are also some GUI design issues (bug #4297). Unfortunately, the
guys that sent a (good) design screenshot didn't answer my e-mails
so far, so GUI redesign must wait until after KDE 2.0. The rest of the
bugs will be fixed in HEAD until KDE 2.0 release.

I think that this was way more important than documenting the code
first.

I'm very sorry if there's code not working on some platforms, but really
don't get enough feedback to find and solve that issues. I'm developing
on Linux and don't have access to other platforms, so I rely on the
feedback. But if it does only consist of "it doesn't work" I really
can't help you in fixing the bug.

Concerning your problem:
The author of Synaesthesia (which kscdmagic is based on) doesn't really
know if it works on other than Linux. See the README in kscdmagic/ for
details. So you found out that there _are_ problems on a FreeBSD (?)
system, did you?

Maybe it's better to think my decision over and take kscdmagic out of
business for KDE 2.0.

  -dirk

-- 
                   D i r k   F "o r s t e r l i n g                  
  milliByte@gmx.net  ********  http://www.DeathsDoor.com/milliByte/
                           -------------
    "Die 4-Stündige Klausur geht von 8:00Uhr bis 14:00Uhr" - R.K. 
 
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