The other day I had to dive into the ksmserver code, the core of session management in KDE Plasma, but found it all a bit difficult to read. If only I could get a callgraph I thought… Turns out it actually is possible! In fact it is almost too easy with clang/llvm. There are already solutions that attach LLVM bitcode to existing binaries. e.g. gllvm. gllvm basically is a shim sitting between ninja and the actual compiler and injects some behavior for us. Read More

For a while now DrKonqi has a special developer notification system when used in combination with coredumpd. I just realized I never told anyone about it 😅 though. It’s terribly simple: When used with coredumpd, parts of DrKonqi implicitly look at all crashes that pertain to your current user. Because of that it can also notify on all crashes, not just the KDE-related ones. Obviously it can’t report bugs or anything but sometimes, as a developer, it’s nice to know when things explode. Read More

The other week the question came up how one can debug an application crash when the Windows Store crash tracking system is unable to produce a usable stack trace. Seemed a good enough opportunity to share some wisdom :) Generally speaking in order to get a stack trace you first need a minidump. minidumps are kind of like core dumps on POSIX systems, well, except, mini. Acquiring that is should be your first goal. Read More

…very hard. KDE relies heavily on web services, and many of them need to be kept responsive even under strenuous load. I’ve recently had the opportunity to spend some time on load testing one of our websites and would like to share how that worked out. To properly test things I wanted to have multiple computers make concurrent requests to the service and ensure that the service still performs within acceptable limits. Read More

People keep lamenting how lackluster Qt’s SVG renderer is. It leads to poorly rendered icons and wallpapers and it mostly only implements the SVG Tiny specification. As a weekend project I put together a resvg based image handler replacement. It was super easy because resvg is amazing! The Plugins An application that uses QSvgRenderer actually can, for the most part, just use resvg’s Qt header and call it a day. It has a very convenient interface that lets you replace most uses of QSvgRenderer with resvg’s. Read More

At KDE we make software for many different platforms. One of them is Microsoft Windows. But what if an application crashes on Windows? New tech enables us to track crashes right in Sentry! Time to learn about it. When an application crashes on Windows the user can submit crash data to Microsoft. Later KDE, as publisher of the app, can retrieve the crashes from there. This is the standard crash handling for the platform and it works incredibly well. Read More

Every once in a while I hear developers having trouble staying up to date with KDE Discuss(ions). No great surprise when I then find out they aren’t tracking things (in other words: not subscribed to categories)! Discourse, the software that powers KDE Discuss, has a number of handy notifications settings that we can use to have the software bring posts to us instead of having to go to the website every once in a while. Read More

Akademy, KDE’s annual conference, recently took place in Thessaloniki, Greece. Lots of people were super excited about the prospect of getting GUI Testing off the ground based on the Selenium tech I built last year. Since KDE produces cross-platform applications an obvious question arose though… What about Windows? It’s surprisingly easy! Indeed the most time consuming part is probably getting your hands on a Windows Development Virtual Machine. Once you have a Windows installation we need to only spin up our toolchain and off we go. Read More

Flatpaks are amazing and all that. But application sandboxing, so an application cannot do anything it wants, is a challenge - even more so when you have two applications that need to talk to each other. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that native-messaging sandboxing support for Flatpak has been in development for over a year. To celebrate its anniversary I thought I’d write down how to drill a native-messaging sized hole into the sandbox. Read More

At KDE we have multiple levels of quality assurance ranging from various degrees of a humans testing features to fully automated testing. Indeed automated testing is incredibly important for the continued quality of our software. A big corner stone of our testing strategy are so called unit tests, they test a specific piece of our software for its behavior in isolation. But for many aspects of our software we need a much higher level view, testing pieces of Plasma’s application launcher in isolation is all good and well but that won’t tell us if the entire UI can be easily navigated using the keyboard. Read More