Monday 1 June 2015

GSoC 2015 Week #1 with Amarok

Well it has been a week since the GSoC coding period started.
I have pushed commits to the personal repository here. A KDE community page was created by Myriam Schweingruber which can be found here and it consists of the details about the porting of Amarok. I will also be making changes to that page over time.

The major changes that I introduced in the Amarok code-base till now are as follows:

  • I have changed the CMake files and I have added ECM (with a minimum version of 1.7.0) in it. The KF5 libraries have been remodelled into a set of independent modules enabling the developers to use only the specific parts which they need and avoid pulling unwanted dependencies. For this reason, for now I have added a few key components of KF5 and Qt5 for the cmake to find. I will be adding more components as and when required. I have added the list of the new dependencies here.
  • A major development included a change in MySQLAmarok.cmake module. As feature_summary has been used with FATAL_ON_MISSING_REQUIRED_PACKAGES, MySQLAmarok was turning out to be missing as MYSQLAMAROK_FOUND wasn't yet defined. So I have defined MYSQLAMAROK_FOUND as TRUE when both mysql and its embedded libraries have been found. More details on this have been given in the commit and in the cmake module itself.
  • The porting scripts in kde-dev-scripts have been a lot of help to me (kudos to Laurent Montel, Kevin Funk, David Faure and all other contributors). I have used them and they really eased the conversion of KUrl to QUrl and in many many more changes (like the next one).
  • The icons have been renamed according to the new pattern and the ecm_install_icons calls have been changed similarly which previously created a lot of warnings.
    CMake version was increased to 2.8.12 as it's the minimum required to use FindKF5.cmake.
  • To port to CMAKE_AUTOMOC, the moc include files were no longer needed(except a few places) and they have been removed as they too created a lot of warnings.
  • QT_NO_URL_CAST_FROM_STRING has been added to make the changes from QUrl from QString explicit.
I will be adding the definitions to disable depreciation warnings in upcoming commits.

One of the major problems that I have faced this week was in porting to KF5::ThreadWeaver. The documentation of the new API was surprisingly lacking in very important details. I faced problems in usage of the QObjectDecorator class where some signals have been moved into. I have thought of two solutions for this which lets the files compile and which I am planning to test in future. For this I spent some time on learning about the fine details of the working of signals and slots systems.

It has been a very nice first week and I have learnt the details of quite a few things like the above said signals and slots system and I also spent some time to learn about the cmake's AUTOMOC system too.

Cheers !!!

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