This week I attended the 2024 edition of KDE Akademy in Würzburg, Germany.

Akademy

Akademy 2024 group photo, CC-BY-SA 4.0 by Andy Betts.
CC-BY-SA 4.0 by Andy Betts

Akademy is the people. Just a bit over 100km away from Würzburg I attended my very first Akademy in 2004. Twenty years later I still meet some of the same people, as well as some I had never met in person before. Some people I had met in several countries this year alone already, some I hadn’t seen again since before the pandemic. It’s a week of hanging out with friends.

I got back physically exhausted but refreshed with many ideas and a huge motivational boost, and I can’t wait to see what will come out of all the things discussed and started there.

A big thank you to everyone who helped to make Akademy happen, and to those of you who enabled people to attend with your donations!

Topics

I’ll try to list some of the topics I ended up involved in discussing, in talks, BoFs or elsewhere, but that’s bound to only scratch the surface. Also check out Planet KDE for more reports.

CI/CD and Craft

  • If/how could we give tooling the ability to create MRs (e.g. for release automation)?
  • How can we get CI coverage for Craft and Craft Blueprint changes? At least for the latter there are some ideas.
  • Possible branching strategies for Craft Blueprints, to address the problem of all changes hitting the stable package builds immediately.
  • Ways to work around or remove assumptions in our CI/CD infrastructure about the amount of parallel branches. Usually we have a development and a release branch, but there are cases of multiple still active release branches (e.g. Plasma LTS, or overlaps during the Gear release cycle).
  • Removing the strong version locking between the Android CI image and the target Qt version.
  • Using Qt’s upcoming SBOM tooling to generate package manifests, to automate collecting and maintaining information about 3rd party dependencies we ship in application packages (for FOSS license compliance).

See also the CI/CD BoF notes and Ben’s, Hannah’s, Julius’ and my talk.

KWallet successor

How to evolve our password and credential store was also a topic, following previous discussions at GPN22 and FrOSCon.

There generally seem to be two different types of data that need their own handling and consumer-facing APIs:

  • Usernames and passwords, passkeys or 2FA secrets that you might want to sync between different devices.
  • Device-bound secrets that are not shareable, like OAuth tokens or XDG portal secrets.

Building blocks for parts of this exist, but even when putting everything together there’s still gaps.

Migration from the status quo will also be challenging, as many different things need to happen in the right order, not all of which are under our control.

Localization

  • Qt 6.6 added QQmlEngine::markCurrentFunctionAsTranslationBinding() which should allow us to make our i18n QML functions automatically reevaluate on language changes. That would be an enormous step forward for making runtime language changes work in QML applications, but it still requires a creative solution for dependency issues its use would cause in KF::I18n.
  • Debugged various cases of our Android apps mixing up translations from different languages. All of that seems to trace back to a wrong fallback handling of non-US English-language locales (we should prefer en_US as a fallback in that case, but end up using secondary languages first instead). And newer Android versions seem to have a separated region from the language settings, making it easier to hit this issue.

Static builds

Being able to build our libraries and applications statically has been on the wishlist since a long time. Work has happened into that direction, but we haven’t gotten to the point to put all this together yet.

There’s now a stronger need for this though, with the first bits of iOS support landing in Craft, and Qt on iOS can only be linked statically.

Emergency alerts

Thursday morning the Plasma Mobile BoF coincided with the yearly test of Germany’s emergency alert systems. And while we didn’t manage to capture the cell broadcast with ModemManager, the push notification based system worked.

German public emergency alert testing message shown in a Plasma popup notification.
Public emergency alert notification.

I also got a data feed for New Zealand earthquake warnings and we discussed ways to make push notifications work on Linux mobile devices even in power save mode, something that will benefit not just the emergency alerts.

Android

  • There’s a new Qt JNI array API coming, similar to something we already have in the KAndroidExtras code. More of that in Qt should help reducing the dependencies on the Android platform calendar integration, making it easier to move that to KF::CalendarCore.
  • All pieces of the window insets color API have been merged, so the Android status and navigation bars now follow the Breeze style color for KDE apps.
Screenshot of Itinerary on Android with the Android status bar matching Itinerary's background color.
Android status bar matching application colors.
  • There’s agreement on retiring the KDE Frameworks 5 Android CI coverage, which would remove quite some maintenance burden. We don’t use this anywhere anymore, and external users of KF5 on Android are exceedingly unlikely as Qt5 will likely not produce APKs anymore which are in line with Google Play store guidelines.
  • We discussed ideas for a cross-platform alarm/wakeup API, to be added to KIdleTime. That is, timers that also work while the application isn’t running, or even when the device is in sleep mode.

Kongress

Kongress generally worked, and given the incoming wishes for additional features it seems it was actually used.

We did learn though that rolling out updates to event specific content for the map needs to be possible fairly quickly, this tended to need manual CDN flushes too often.

I also got a chance to try the indoor localization solution from the team we met at 37C3 in the Akademy venue. It’s unfortunately not Free Software, but it’s nevertheless interesting to see what performance/precision can be achieved without special infrastructure in the building, with just the existing radio beacons, inertial sensors and a building map. Still a bit out of reach for us, but if the past is any indication we’ll eventually get there as well I guess.

See also my talk on OSM indoor venue maps in Kongress.

Itinerary

Conference travel of course also results in work around KDE Itinerary:

  • Nobody got lost on the way to Akademy due to Itinerary issues it seems. That’s a big relief.
  • As this was my first chance of field testing the new two-level timeline view, a bunch of fixes and improvements followed from that.
  • Identified why opening the bus stop map showed the full city map instead in Würzburg (it’s the fault of the “Ringpark”…).
  • Improved stop point/quay display for large bus stations on the map.
  • Andy Betts designed new public transport icons, replacing the current incoherent mix of different styles.
  • As one attendee got Frankfurt Hahn’ed we are now looking into having Itinerary warn about airports with SEO names.

See you next time!

Looking forward to the next opportunity to meet all of you again! At least for some I don’t have to wait very long, considering the Nextcloud Community Conference 2024 today and the Matrix conference next week in Berlin.