There is a lot of nice stuff to do in northern hemisphere currently, given it is Summer time here. And porting is less nice to do, so many problems to solve with no immediate gain usually 🙂
Thus things are moving slowly in the on-going port of Calligra to Qt5/KF5 (cmp. first success at begin of April).
But they are moving, at least.
A few libraries have been split off from Calligra into own repos (more on that in another post), and one is around report generation. This week Calliga Plan, the project management application, could be made working with it again, here a preview (reports not yet added to build in the “frameworks” branch, still waiting for API of the now external library to become stable):
The busy bees behind Krita, the sketching and painting application, all currently are still buzzing around improving the Qt4/kdelibs4 version in the “calligra/2.9” branch, with new features on a sometimes daily basis 🙂 To not lose any improvements there while at the same time the port is going on, currently the policy is that only changes as minimal as needed should be done in the “frameworks” branch, where the port to Qt5/KF5 is happening, to allow simple merging of the “calligra/2.9” branch. The merges are done roughly on a weekly basis, and so far no complicated or unsolvable conflicts were met, also thanks to Qt5 & KF5 with kdelibs4support offering good source compatibility (and what is perfect 😉 ).
Surely this cannot go on forever. Once all regressions in the “frameworks” branch compared to the “calligra/2.9” branch are as good as fixed (with the currently ported programs, some might be lost due to lack of maintainers), this will be declared a milestone: developer focus will switch and feature development then will happen in the “frameworks” branch, which then also might already have become “master”. Not yet completely decided on. And after that we should soon see finally the first released version of Calligra based on Qt5 & KF5.
(BTW, Kexi, the visual database applications creator, has gone for a different porting story, porting directly to kdelibs4support-free code, thus sadly currently only in a branch separate from the “frameworks” branch, until the milestone mentioned before will be reached).
Still now and then a few things are done also for the port of Krita. And on a first glance (if having turned off OpenGL usage), things start to look promising:
So, still not there, still a lot to do, but slowly getting somewhere 🙂 And as usual you are invited to join the efforts.
Attracted by virtual constructs 