KDE: Boolean release

To release or not release... ;-) Well, that's not the question any more. Serenity 1.7 is out in the wild. Go and get it! (Somebody complained that it was hard to retrieve anything when you are here on the blog. So...)

Believe or not but what I find the hardest in a release is making the snapshots. One can put only three snapshots on a KDE-Look page while there are so many features I'd like to show. Besides, I prefer to show Serenity in action in the "real world" than making patchworks like I did in my previous post... Especially when making "patchworks" takes so much time... for a maniac like me that can't stand to see things misaligned even by a single pixel. (I feel it's so careless.)

Whatever. I also had many things to keep in mind, like the fact that my previous free webhost doesn't allow you to store files bigger than 500 KB. I've found another one without size limitation but I had so many problems of unresponsiveness during my FTP session that I abandoned it for a third one. That's the first one I found when I decided to change of webhost but my account was cancelled because I didn't use it immediately or soon enough. Its only problem is that the server isn't properly configured to deliver RPM. The packages are sent as text files. Well, we ain't living in a perfect world apparently. ;-)

Back to my snapshots. I had in mind the idea to show symbol-less buttons. (The third snapshot.)

News flash: RPM packages of Serenity for all the versions of SUSE from 9.3 to 10.2 are now available on OpenSUSE.org. (Thanks Donnie.) Close the parentheses. Amazing world... :-D

"Symbol-less buttons" was I saying. Here came the troubles. I could apply the change so it worked but for some reason the configuration dialog couldn't remember this setting. I was already starting to feel tired... My archives were already stored on my distant website with an HTML page stating their sizes. A bug at this moment meant: Re-build everything. Grumble, grumble. (That's all I write because I'm polite.)

That was it. A long lasting hidden bug. During the update from 1.5 to 1.6 I changed the symbol visibility option from boolean to integer, i.e. from a yes/no checkbox to a combobox with multiple choices... except in one place: when the dialog reads the configuration. That explained everything... and the title of my post.

A stroke of virtual hammer and I was done.

$ make
$ su
# make install ; exit

ALT+F2: kwin --replace

If you want to have "fun", type "kwin --replace" in a Konsole. By the way, the shortcut to restart the X-Server is CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE. ;-)

I went through that painful archives building process... and I got my reward this morning: Serenity on OpenSUSE.org. Next step is to be on SUSE 10.3 CD's. :-D