Let me share a bit of my experience. I have (re)built a lot of
teams in the past, such as gecko@, kde@, python@, and I was
involved in the creation of FreeBSD vbox@ team. I have always
managed to get assistance from a lot of people, but recently more
and more people have started to complain about the slowness,
broken commits and requested for more Call for Testing. And that
is actually a big problem. I am the kind of person who like to
call for test, but I am also the kind of person who easily gets
disapointed when I’m not getting much feedbacks. The best example
here is ATI, Xorg and Xfce update. I did a call for testing because
Xorg and Driver updates is always a big issue because there are so
many different hardware involved with various configurations. From
the call for testing, we managed to get a total of 19 mails of
positive feedback and after 2 weeks I’ve committed the update.
What happened after that was I received a lot of complains for
not conducting much testing, yadda, yadda. Well I say it ain’t
my fault for not testing much, but it is also your fault for not
helping us. It is always easy to blame instead of helping. Ask
yourself why have you not helped us in testing properly and give
us feedbacks. Complaining is fine when it is done in the right
way, with the right tone.

While I’m talking about Xorg, the FreeBSD Xorg Team is currently
a one man show effort, supported by kwm@ and fluffy@. Xorg alone
is too big to get worked on. Plus you should not think that it is
affecting the ports only, but it affects the kernel as well, which
we are having the most problems at the moment. And of course I
would like to call for help on that as well. Based on my last call
for help, it is funny to see how many people wanted to offer some
help, but after knowing the amount of work involved, I have stopped
hearing from these guys. I understand that to update Xorg is always
a crappy job but I love doing it, because it is nice to get more and
more experience in understanding how things work, and it helps to
improve my skills a lot.

Lets a talk a bit about our FreeBSD KDE Team. KDE is nice, but it
really is a fat project. It needs a lot of love, and maintenance
time. Currently it’s a 4 people project, namely makc@, fluffy@ and
avilla@. While for support Raphael Kubo da Costa is handling it
actively. The thing is, KDE involves more than just KDE packages.
It includes Qt, PY-Qt, KOffice and Cmake as well. It is a big
project too and it would be nice to find more people to contribute
in the development.

And now lets talk about gecko@. gecko@ includes all Mozilla Project,
namely Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey. It is currently maintained
by beat@ and decke@, and supported by flo@ and andreas. So again,
I’d like to see some fresh faces for this project as well. If you are willing
to help, do ping us via mail :p.

As for FreeBSD Gnome Team, well I can’t say much about gnome but
whenever I see the cvs commits in marcuscome tree, it seems like
most work for the upcoming gnome3 is done by kwm@, and supported
by marcus@, mezz@ and avl@. Gnome includes not only Gnome things
but it also include gtk and cairo, the one that always cause
problems in a major update. I think the team would love to have
some fresh blood in the team.

Okay, all of these need an understanding of programming and
scripting. If you think that you can’t do any of that, testing would
also help much. FreeBSD is one of the best documented open source
project, so that’s another area that could use some help too. Check
if FreeBSD.org is available in your language, or start helping to
improve the FreeBSD documents in your language. It would be very
helpful and the community will thank you for that. So if you would
like to offer some help, ping me in irc/jabber/mail

- Martin

I’d like to say thanks to Kris Moore, Josh Paetzel,
Dru Lavigne and of course the iXsystem for their
generous donation to build a test machine for KDE.

PS: This means not i jump back to the KDE Team
but I’m always willing to Help when i can.

The FreeBSD KDE Team is happy to let you know that KDE SC 4.6.0 has been
released a few Days ago, and the Release is ready for a public test. Before
you ask, no, we do not want to put KDE 4.6.0 in the ports tree before
FreeBSD 8.2/7.4 is released.

What’s new:
KDE SC 4.6.0 provides major updates to the KDE Plasma workspaces, KDE
Applications and KDE Platform. Theses releases, version 4.6, provide many
new features in each of KDE’s three product lines. The official
release notes for these releases can be found at
http://kde.org/announcements/4.6/

Now you can get KDE SC 4.6 via svn checkout:

svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/PYQT/
svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/PORTS
svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/KDE
svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/Tools/

Then try:

sh Tools/scripts/portsmerge
sh Tools/scripts/kdemerge

Happy updating!!

so long ..

Few Weeks ago i wrote that i’ve got a job offer in Kuala Lumpur,
I got this Job now and unfortunately now I need now to reorder my
life a bit. So first step is now to step down from KDE, Gecko
and vbox teams. I am not really happy about this step but sometimes
priorities goes to new state and we have to reorder something.
I’ll spend my time more to portmgr stuff, mentoring fresh
Blood, Gnats cleanup’s and committing any good stuff. I’d like
to say many thanks for all the nice time in these teams .

- Martin

We the FreeBSD KDE Team are happy to let you know KDE SC 4.4.0 was
released few mins ago, and we’re ready for a public test. Before
you ask we don’t want to put KDE 4.4.0 in the ports tree before
FreeBSD 7.3 was released.

What is new:
KDE SC 4.4.0 provide many new features, designed to integrate
local and network social services .. and a lot more. The official
release notes for this release can be found at
http://kde.org/announcements/4.4/

Now you can get KDE SC 4.4 with a svn checkout:

svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/PORTS
svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/KDE
svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/Tools/

now try:

sh Tools/scripts/portsmerge
sh Tools/scripts/kdemerge

Please read carefull /usr/ports/UPDATING-area51
http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/UPDATING-area51

Happy Updating!!

The official release notes for this release can be found at
here . KDE 4.3.5 the last bugfix release in 4.3.x series.

It was not planned to have KDE 4.3.5 in our Ports Tree,
because we, the FreeBSD KDE Team spend all our energy to port
KDE 4.4 release. But we thought it would be good to have it
in out FreeBSD 7.3 release.

We’d like to say thanks to all helpers and submitters.

The FreeBSD KDE team is pleased to announce public call for testing Qt-4.6.0.
Ports can be downloaded from area51 repository:

svn co http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/QT

and integrated into portstree using ‘qtmerge’ script from

http://area51.pcbsd.org/trunk/area51/Tools/scripts/

Alternatively you can use patch vs portstree:

http://people.freebsd.org/~makc/patches/qt460.patch.bz2

Knowing issues: devel/qt4-designer fails to build when previous version is
installed, so you have to deinstall qt4-designer before starting update
procedure.

Please send feedback to kde-freebsd@kde.org

Special thanks to Alberto Villa for his hard work on getting Qt-4.6.0 ports
into shape.

Max Brazhnikov, on behalf of the FreeBSD KDE team