While the winter sets in, I have been mostly busy following up on job leads and applying to anything and everything. Something has to stick… I am trying! Even out of industry.
Debian:
This weeks main focus was getting involved and familiar with Debian rust-packaging. It is really quite different from other teams! I was successful and the MR is https://salsa.debian.org/rust-team/debcargo-conf/-/merge_requests/566 if anyone on the rust team can take a gander, I will upload when merged. I will get a few more under my belt next week now that I understand the process.
KDE neon:
Unfortunately, I did not have much time for neon, but I did get some red builds fixed and started uploading the new signing key for mauikit* applications.
KDE snaps:
A big thank you to Josh and Albert for merging all my MR’s and I have finished 23.08.3 releases to stable.
I released a new Krita 5.2.1 with some runtime fixes, please update.
Still no source of income so I must ask, if you have any spare change, please consider a donation.
Here in the US, we celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow. I am thankful to be a part of such an amazing community. I have raised enough to manage another month and I can continue my job search in less dire circumstances. I am truly grateful to each and every one of you. While my focus will remain on my job hunt, I will be back next week at reduced hours to maintain my work. I have to alter my priorities to keep my hours reduced enough to focus on my job search so I will be contributing as follows:
I will ramp up my Debian work to increase my skillset here, as it is an important skill and one that I am seeking employment in. I will be increasing the areas of expertise in packaging different languages, security updates and help the KDE team with the Qt6 transition.
I will continue to help where I can with KDE neon, because well, I love KDE neon and our team. If time allows, I would like to help with moving forward with Harald’s initial work to transition us to use Gitlab infrastructure. It will be a big move from Jenkins.
Snaps: I will only support our Qt5 snaps at this point. That entails possibly one more release and I will maintain / fix bugs on these. Snaps have been a huge chunk of my time ( 191 snaps! plus content packs, extensions, updates, fixes, solving confinement issues ). I simply cannot do it all over again with Qt6. Unless of course someone wants to fund my work. Then I will reconsider.
I am also going to expand my knowledge in the containerized world with Flatpaks and refresher on Appimages to flesh out my resume.
Again, thank you all ever so much for your support. Though, this didn’t end up being my year, I am confident I will find my place in this career path in the near future.
I could still use some funds to make land and car payment or at least partial. We purchased from friends so they won’t take away my wheels or home, I just feel bad I haven’t been able to make payments in awhile. Thanks for your consideration.
I write this with a heavy heart. Exactly one year ago I lost my beloved job. That was all me, I had a terrible run of bad luck with COVID and I never caught up. In the last year, I have taken on several new projects to re-create a new image for myself and to make up for the previous year, and I believe I worked very hard in doing so. Unfortunately, my seemingly good interviews have not ended in a job. One potential job I did not put as much effort into as I should have because I put all my cards into a project that didn’t quite turn out as expected. I do hope it still goes through for the KDE community as a whole, because well it is really cool, but it isn’t the job I thought. I have been relying purely on donations for survival and it simply isn’t enough. I am faced once again with no internet to even do my open source work ( Snaps, KDE neon, Debian and everything that links to those ). I simply can’t put the burden of my stubbornness on my family any longer. Bills are long over due, we have learned to live without many things, but the stress of essential bills, living expenses going unpaid is simply too much. I do thank each and every one of you that has contributed to my fundraisers. It means the world to me that people do care. It just isn’t enough. So with the sunset of Witch Wells, I am sun setting my software career for now and will be looking for something, anything local just to pay some bills, calm our nerves and hopefully find some happiness again. I am tired, broke, stressed out and burned out. I will be back when I can breathe again with my finances.
If you can spare some changes to help with gas, propane, internet I would be so ever grateful.
A big thank you goes to my parents this week for contributing to my survival fund. With that I was able to make a big push on fixing some outstanding issues on some of our snaps.
Marble! Now shows all maps and finds its plugins properly.
Neochat: A significant fix regarding libsecret in which left users with endless loading screen because it could not authenticate. Bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=473003 This actually affected any app in KDE that uses libsecret… KDE desktops do not ship with gnome-keyring, so this is why sometimes installing it would fix the issue ( if the portals were installed and working correctly AND XDG variables were set correctly). In most cases it works out of the box. In some cases, you must install gnome-keychain via apt and reinstall neochat to setup a new account and it will then prompt to save to keyring. If you are a KDE desktop user and wish to use Kwallet you can sudo snap connect neochat:password-manager-service :password-manager-service , my next order of business is to set up kwallet as a service inside the snaps. Should funding allow.
Another pile of 23.08.2 releases almost at 100% now.
KDE neon:
No major blowups this week. Worked out issues with kmail-account-wizard thanks to David R! This is now in the hands of upstream ( porting not complete )
While Yang our cat tries to lure in unsuspecting birds on the bird feeder, I have been busy working on many things. First things first though, a big thank you to all that donated to my Internet bill. I was able to continue my work without interruption.
KDE neon:
A busy week in KDE neon as https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.27.9/ was released! We have it ready to update in User edition or if you would like to download the new ISO you can find it here: https://neon.kde.org/download I highly advise the User Edition as Unstable is volatile right now with Qt6 transition and ABI breakage. Which leads me to the next busy work for the week. Plasma 6 exploded breaking unstable desktops all over, including mine! A library changed and it was not backward compatible, so we had to rebuild the Qt6 $world to get Plasma and PIM functional again. I am happy to report it is all fixed now, but I cannot stress enough, if you don’t want to chance broken things, please use the User Edition! I also continued the orange -> green build effort in making sure all our runtime dependencies are up to date. This fixes odd UI bugs and developers have all the build dependencies needed to build their applications.
KDE Snaps:
Several more 23.08.2 snaps have arrived in the snap store including the new to snaps Kamoso!
KDE snap Kamoso
I have an auto-connect request to the snap-store policy folks, but until it is approved please snap connect kamoso:camera :camera I have a pile of new MR’s in for non release service applications and some fixes for issues found while testing. While this new workflow does take a bit longer waiting for approvals I like it much better as I am developing closer relationships with the application developers.
I have made significant progress on the Kf6 ( Qt6 based ) content snap. I am about 90% complete. While this doesn’t mean much for users yet, it will when KDE applications release their qt6 ports starting the next major release cycle. I will be ready!
The last bit for snap work is I have almost completed my akonadi service snap. This will connect to all KDE PIM snaps so they share data. Akonadi is the background database that ties all the PIM applications together.
Debian:
This week I have worked on updates for several golang packages including charmbracelet/lipgloss charmbracelet/bubbles, and muesli-termenv. unfortunately I am stuck golang-github-aymanbagabas-go-osc52. The work is done in salsa but the maintainer has not uploaded. I have shot an email to the maintainer. I have also begun mentoring my first potential future DD! I reviewed his python-scienceplots and python-art which should land in Debian soon.
Thanks for stopping by! As usual, if you can please spare some change, consider a donation. All proceeds go to surviving another day to work on cool things to land on your desktop!
I have been working around the clock and over the weekend trying to get the transition for snapcraft files in their respective repos. What does this mean for users? Faster releases for Snaps and closer collaboration between snapcrafters and application developers so bugs get resolved much quicker.
Unfortunately, I have 2 days to finish before my internet gets cut off. I did not make enough to pay the bill. Seeing as this is the first time in a year, I am absolutely, positively grateful for all of you and your support over the past year. I know my work is appreciated! I will never be homeless or starve due to my wonderful local community, but the Internet bill is not something we can barter or trade labor for.
I have caught up on my Debian obligations ( so no MIA needed! )
KDE neon is in good hands with Jonathan and Carlos.
So for now, farewell ( I assure you I will be back! )
It’s that time of year already! We have hit our first freeze of the year. While the kitties keep warm by the wood burning stove, I have been busy with many updates and fixes in a variety of projects.
KDE neon:
It’s true, Neon unstable has been very unstable. Due to a few factors including a builder being out of space, timed with a new Qt release. There is a cost with living in unstable land with bleeding edge releases. It takes time and finesse to get everything happy, especially with major transitions such as Qt. The drive issue was just bad timing. We worked night and day ( quite literally with people spanning from the US, Europe and Australia ) to get everything happy again. I know it’s frustrating when things are broken, but please keep in mind, most of us are volunteers. I am happy to report, it is once again stable. If you continue to experience issues please report them on https://bugs.kde.org there have been a few cases where there were rogue apt sources lists creating issues. We also have the User edition which is much more stable!
KDE Snaps:
The big move to snapcraft files per repo continues. With that comes a new version 23.08.2. This big win this week was Audiotube! I have finally got this snap working. With a combination of snappy-debug and snap run –gdb audiotube I was able to find all the hidden dependencies such as yt-dlp needed to be built with ffmpeg support and it needed a newer ytmusicapi as the version it called for was broken with gettext translations. I also had to fix the dbus name as it was not the standard org.kde.app. The final fix was it required the alsa plug and layouts adjusted to point to the snap alsa libraries ( which fixed the very important sound feature ). Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Unfortunately, it still requires –devmode to run, as it has one last network issue even with all the network plugs. I have to set it aside for now, as I have many more snaps to migrate. However, if you want to enjoy youtube music with this super awesome app you can, just append –devmode when installing. Enjoy!
The following apps have now migrated to their respective KDE repos and have the snap recipes in launchpad for automated builds:
Blinken
Bovo
Calindori
Dragon
Dolphin ( still needs work )
Digikam ( still needs work )
Elisa ( Working on new qml issue )
Falkon
Filelight
GCompris
Granatier
Ghostwriter
Gwenview ( working on missing dependency )
Haruna ( still needs work )
isoimagewriter ( working on gpg support )
Itinerary
Juk
K3b ( still needs work )
A new content pack with the latest Frameworks 5.110 and Qt 5.15.11 is complete and the neon extension update will follow after the required global autoconnect is approved from the store.
Debian:
I have caught up on my dashboard with new releases, fixed test failures, and FTBFS on the more obscure arches. The following debian packages have been uploaded to unstable:
If you have made it this far, thank you! As you can see I am quite busy and there is still much to do. If you can possibly spare a donation so I can continue my efforts in KDE neon / KDE Snaps / and Debian, it would be so appreciated. I enjoy doing this work and I hope it benefits someone out there. Have a lovely day and thanks for stopping by.
KDE neon is extremely important to the KDE snaps eco-system as I briefly mentioned in my last post.
Why? KDE neon is based on Jammy LTS which is the same as Core 22 base for snaps. Neon has a very useful continuous integration system in place that tests all the things, including dependencies, qml, cmake errors, debian packaging lintian tool and the list go on. This is very important to get packages out that don’t break things on user desktops. Once the packages are a lovely shade of green on the neon CI ( or at least all the important issues are resolved ) it is in good shape for snapping. I have scripts that pull the build and runtime dependency information for our application package to use in the snapcraft.yaml. We know this list is complete, because it passed the tests!
As applications gain features, they requires newer dependencies than what is provided in the ubuntu jammy repositories. Neon builds those newer dependencies and provides them to our users in the neon aptly repositories. It is much easier and more reliable than tracking down PPAs and hoping they stay maintained. We use the neon user edition repository in our snapcraft file to ensure we are up to date on KDE applications dependency needs.
This week my work in Neon included turning jobs green and fixing kio-gdrive which is still qt5, but it’s dependency libkgapi is qt6! We have to provide both versions in cases like this which entails tracking both master and the qt5 release branch.
Snaps:
This week begun the big transition from single repository remote-builds to per repository snapcraft and using snap recipes on launchpad. This is an important move for a couple of reasons. We were having major issues with build failures as I pointed out in this bug report on launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/2031307 . This was due to the way remote-build works. It creates temporary snap recipes that builds once and sends back the snap or failure status. This made it very difficult to debug build failures as once the failure status was sent the job disappeared off of launchpad, taking all build logs with it.
Now with the per repository snapcraft files, I have set up proper snap recipes on launchpad and the builds are automated by polling the github mirror for changes and it publishes the shiny new snap to candidate for testing or sends me the failure log that I can view at my convenience.
This of course is a work in progress as we have 186 snaps currently and there are a few steps to get each one done. But once it is done, it will reduce my workload immensely and make debugging build issues faster.
While making the move, I am also updating the snapcraft files for changes within snapcraft, adding cleanup to decrease bloat and fixing bugs!
Snap move complete:
KMymoney 5.1: Fixed issue where hitting calculator button did nothing. It now launches a kcalc snap.
I also made a new content pack with KDE frameworks 5.110, but a new Qt 5.15.11 was just released so I will be making a new one tomorrow.
The kf6 content snap has come to a halt as the qt6 content snap has stalled. I asked to be given access to the snapcraft file so that I may collaborate, but have not heard back.
My mysterious project has reached its end for me. I might get a part time gig doing snaps out of it, but I do not meet the requirements to do any of the engineering of it. It is what it is. Thank you to all who vouched for me, alas it wasn’t meant to be.
If you can spare some change, I would appreciate it, especially to pay my phone/Internet bill so I can do more Neon and snaps 🙂 Thank you for stopping by.
I would like to welcome you to my revamped site. It is still a work in progress, so please be patient while I work out the kinks! I have also explained a bit more about myself in my About Me page for those that may have questions about my homesteader lifestyle. Check it out when you have time.
My site is mostly my adventures in packaging software in Linux in a variety of formats ( mostly Debian and Ubuntu Snaps containerized packages ). This keeps me very busy, as folks don’t realize the importance of packaging. Without it, applications remain in source code form which isn’t very usable by the users! While turning the source code into something user friendly we often run into issues and work with upstream ( I am a very strong believer in upstream first ) to resolve any issues. This makes for a better user experience and less buggy software. Workarounds are very hard to maintain and thus fixing it right the first time is the best path! With this said, while I am not strong in any one programming language ( Well maybe Ruby from my CI tooling background ) I am versed in many languages, as I have to understand the code that I am filing bug reports for! We have to have a strong knowledge of being able to understand build failures, debug runtime failures and most importantly we have to be able to fix them, or find the resources to assist in fixing them. As most of you know I am KDE’s biggest fan ( There is nothing wrong with Gnome, its a great platform ). So a big portion of my work is dedicated to KDE. A fantastic tool for working on my KDE packaging has been KDE Neon! With the developer version I have all the tools necessary to debug and fix issues that arise. There is also the added bonus of living on the edge and finding out runtime issues right away!
That is enough about me for now and on to my weekly round up!
KDE neon:
Carlos ( check out his new blog! https://www.ethicalconstruct.au/dotclear_blog/ ) and I have been very busy with another round of KDE applications making the move to Qt6. We have finished KDE PIM and KDE Games in Neon/unstable!
Fixed issues with a broken kscreenlocker and missing window decorations. You can now safely leave your computer and not worry about that dreaded black screen.
Debian:
I have uploaded the newest squashfuse to unstable.
I have uploaded another NEW dependency for bubblegum golang-github-alecthomas-mango-kong-dev
Ubuntu Snaps:
This week continues working closely with Jarred Wilson of Canonical in getting his Qt6 content snap in shape for use with my KDE Frameworks 6 snap ( an essential snap to move forward with our next generation Qt6 applications and of course the Plasma snap.
I spent some time debugging the neochat snap and fixed some QML issues, but I am now facing issues with wayland. It now works fine for those of us still on X11. I will continue working out wayland.
Thank you!
I rely on donations to upkeep my everyday living and so far thanks to each and every one of you I have survived almost a full year! It has been scary from time to time, but I am surviving. Until my snap project goes through I must rely on the kindness of my supporters. The proceeds of my donations goes to the following:
Car payment
Car insurance
Land Payment
Gas for vehicles ( car for errands, truck to haul water )
Propane
Food
Phone / Internet ( Very important in this line of work! )
Pet Food ( Yes we have a few )
Misc everyday living supplies ( shampoo etc )
I have joined the kool kids and moved to Donorbox for donations.
With user edition out the door last week, this week was spent stabilizing unstable!
Spent some time sorting out our Calamares installer being quite grumpy which is now fixed by reverting an upstream change. Unstable and developer ISO rebuilt and installable. Spent some time sorting out some issues with using an unreleased appstream ( thanks ximion for help with packagekit! ) KDE applications are starting to switch to Qt6 in master this week, the big one being KDE PIM! This entails an enormous amount of work re-packaging. I have made a dent, sorta. To be continued next week. I fixed our signond / kaccounts line for qt6 which entailed some work on upstream code that uses QStringList.toSet which was removed in Qt6! Always learning new things!
I have spent some time working on the KF6 content snap, working with Jarred to make sure his qt6 content snap will work for us. Unfortunately, I do not have much time for this as I must make money to survive, donations help free up time for this 🙂 Our new proposal with Kevin’s super awesome management company has been submitted and we will hopefully hear back next week.
