Mandriva has decided to help porting K3b, the leading and award-winning KDE burning software, to Qt4.
2 engineers of our KDE team are working together with Sebastian Trueg, the lead developer of this project, so that new version can be released sooner and hopefully for 2009 Spring release. Linux users will finally be able to make K3b use the full power of the KDE4 platform through Solid, Phonon and all the Plasma environment. Boiko is one of our 2 engineers working at the moment on this port.
What does your work consist in?
Boiko: KDE4 and Qt4 brought many new possibilities for developers. But in order to benefit from those possiblities, it is necessary to port all the KDE3/Qt3 code to these new infrastructure. K3b port has been started some time ago, but there are still a lot of work to be done. Our work is to finish this port work and at the same time to simplify the code by making use of the new KDE4 and Qt4 frameworks available for many of the tasks that used to be done “by hand” inside the application.
What are the targets in general and in KDE4?
Boiko: The main target is to get K3b working for at least the most common tasks (like burning data CDs and DVDs, Audio CDs, VCD, etc). Apart from that, the target is also to keep K3b integrated into KDE4 by adapting it to the new frameworks and guidelines.
Sebastian added: “Gustavo and Arthur are working on porting all project views to the Qt4 view/model architecture. They are processing very well and almost all projects have been ported. I ported the d’n'd support, fixed plugin management, and a few other things that broke with the change from KDE3 to KDE4. K3b trunk contains a lot of improvements which partially are not finished yet. I am trying to get most of it done for April.”
We wish them good work and see you at the end of 2009 Spring release!
