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Summary

Kubuntu tools which need ported to KDE 4 for Intrepid.

Release Note

To accompany the switch to KDE 4, many applications have been ported and updated to integrate with this new desktop version.

Rationale

We should integrate apps as much as possible with the desktop.

Design

The Dist Upgrade tool (part of update-manager sources) needs ported to KDE 4. This will be a fairly straight forward port, of course it will need to be tested to run on Hardy.

Adept needs ported to KDE 4. Petr has made good progress on this already. It needs a solution to apt-xapian-index not creating the index at install time and a way to updated it regularly. The notifier needs rewritten as a Plasmoid applet. It should include the patches added by Kubuntu to support Apport and reboot notifier.

Adept Batch will be replaced with a PackageKit application. This means applications which use Adept Batch currently will have a way to move to using PackageKit, making their code more distribution independent.

GDebi-kde needs a port to KDE 4. It will need the embedded Konsole widget removed since that does not yet exist in KDE 4, we can copy the code from the Dist Upgrade tool to do this.

Jockey-kde is currently a PyQt4 application. It should be ported to PyKDE 4 to integrate better with the desktop, this is a fairly simple change of QApplication changing to KApplication and icon loading using the KDE method. We would also like to integrate it with System Settings. This would require a wrapper to be able to load python kcontrol modules in KDE 4, similar to the one for KDE 3. The above changes are low priority since the Jockey experience is already quite good.

kdesudo-kde4 needs some changes to sync the KDE 3 version with the KDE 4 version. This is currently in progress.

We have patches in KDE's language module to integrate Language Selector, adding buttons to install, uninstall and set the system language. These should be ported to KDE 4. Language Selector should be ported to KDE 4.

Ubiquity should be ported from PyQt4 to PyKDE4 to integrate better with the desktop. Icon loading will be the main code change needed. This is low priority, although should not take long to implement.

Good work was made on porting System Config Printer to KDE in hardy. The port should be finished to match the Gnome version. The main missing features are the custom settings page and the new printer wizard. We will continue to implement the user interface according to the review done for Hardy, http://obso1337.org/hci/kde/kubuntu_printer_configuration.pdf

KMilo has been removed in KDE 4 because it solved the keyboard problem in the wrong place. Instead functionality for handling laptop keys should be directly in the relevant application. KMix should handle volume keys. Guidance-power-manager should handle brightness keys. Amarok should handle media playing keys. They should use knotify to show a message on the display, as is the KDE standard way.

We will check with kvkbd upstream if he has plans for KDE 4 porting.

KNetworkConf is quite broken in KDE 4. We will replace it with Pardus's network setup tool.

Guidance's user setup tool should be replaced with Pardus's user setup tool.

Guidance's mount setup tool is low priority for porting since we have user hard disk mounting now, and kio slaves can work for other filesystem types such as SMB.

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