Dolphin bugs fixed in April 2013

Here are the bugs which were fixed in Dolphin for last week’s release:

• Aureliéns efforts to make our hover animation as good as possible were not over yet: one little bug remained after his recent fixes. For details, see git commit c3a7ba4e, review request 109960.
• Bug 316129: When entering a directory, load the icons for the visible icons first, rather than loading all icons in random order. See git commit 52a38ee9, review request 109843.
• Bug 317827: Fix possible crash when filtering items. See git commit 34d0ad72.
• Bug 316285: Fix crash in the accessibility code. See git commit f8bf2577.
• Bug 317772: Disable the non-working Find/Replace actions when renaming inline. See git commit a16562cd.
• Bug 193298: Make sure that the correct free space for the current device is shown when viewing a folder with a name whose beginning coincides with a mount point. See git commit 4f2ecbab, review request 110225.
• Bug 318942: When renaming multiple files, make sure that the “Rename” button is enabled if and only if there is exactly one connected sequence of ‘#’ symbols. See git commit cbb2a4cf, review request 110223.
• Bug 305734: Fix the problem that selected hidden items are hard to see with certain color schemes. See git commit 572513a1, review request 110164.
• Bug 302037: Prevent that the view URL changes unexpectedly when the Terminal Panel is enabled and the current path is a symbolic link to a directory. See git commit 2e123de9, review request 110233.

Thanks for providing patches, helpful analysis and testing proposed fixes: Aurélien Gâteau, David Faure, Emmanuel Pescosta, and Jekyll Wu.

Dolphin bugs fixed in March 2013

Here is a summary of the bug fixes that Dolphin users who upgrade to last week’s release can benefit from:

• Bug 288824: Fix the problem that no custom icons are shown for folders which are accessed via NFS and some other file systems. See git commit 6369b556 for the infrastructure in kdelibs, and commit b8c9aa55 for the patch that makes Dolphin use it.
• Bug 316335: Make sure that children of expanded directories are removed from the  model if the parent is collapsed, and prevent that they reappear when the filter is removed. See git commit acec0e65, review request 109343.
• Bug 315619: Do not skip rows in Details View when scrolling by clicking the empty area of the scroll bar. See git commit 6ba70a6f, review request 109210.
• Bug 316615: If files with multiple types are selected, show the services for the file type ‘octet stream’ in the context menu. See git commit 4da8e6cd.
• Bug 316016: Another kdelibs issue that caused Dolphin to not update the view properly. This one was about the deletion of a directory not being noticed and could be fixed thanks to good instructions to reproduce the bug provided by the forum user gedgon. See git commit 1f6d6cfc.
• Bug 316300: Fixed a bug in the code that prevents the unintended execution of commands in the Terminal Panel when changing the view. This bug could lead to the command being executed in some corner cases. See git commit 6be6988f, review request 109431.
• Bug 315693: Ensure that the Information panel shows “&” in filenames correctly. See git commit 914b8d88, review request 109129.
• Bug 295300: Make sure that F5 reloads all expanded directories when viewing a remote directory. See git commit d3ad8f59, review request 109488.
• A follow-up to the fix for bug 299371: Fix transition between normal and hover images. See git commit 472608e8, review request 109614, and Aurelién’s blog post for details about his smart debugging tricks.
• Bug 317018: Fix a crash in the Mercurial plugin when deselecting a file to commit. See git commit 1f1392a6.
• Bug 315569: Group files by name correctly also for non-ASCII file names. See git commit 02f4a69f, review request 109457.

Thanks to everyone who helped to make these bug fixes possible: Aurélien Gâteau, David Faure, Emmanuel Pescosta, Martin Koller, Pierre Sauter, Vishesh Yadav, Weng Xuetian.

Dolphin bugs fixed in February 2013

Last week KDE released the latest bug fix release. It contains the following changes in Dolphin:

• Bug 315298: Fix crash when clicking an action in the context menu for a removed device in the Places Panel. See git commit 547d10aa, review request 108989.
• Bug 299371: Fix blinking when moving the mouse over an hidden item. See git commit 12d41a88, review request 108858.
• Bug 313342: When changing the “Single click/Double click” setting, apply these changes immediately. See git commit 17eeee6b.
• Bug 315315: Prevent expensive re-layoutings when opening folders with many items. See git commit daf12b8e, review request 108984.
• Bug 315210: When deleting an expanded folder which contains filtered files, make sure that those files do not reappear after clearing the filter. See git commit e053ecdc, review request 108976.
•  At least the first part of Bug 252483: update the “Trash” icon in the Places Panel after restoring files. See git commit bf7cdfca.

Patches were provided by A. Janardhan Reddy, Aniket Anvit, Aurélien Gâteau, and David Faure – thanks!

If you use the “Show in Groups” feature and you have some files with non-ASCII names, you might be able to help us with a fix for next month’s bug fix release. Currently, some things do not quite work right, see the left side of the screenshot below. We have a patch that makes it look like the right side, but I would like to make sure that we don’t break anything in the 4.10 branch. Feel free to download the patch from the review request, and report any regressions there or in the bug report. Thanks.

 

Dolphin 2.2 is there!

I told you about the changes in Dolphin 2.2 some time ago already. Here is a summary of the last bugs that were fixed during the beta/RC phase:

• Bug 311582: Fix another “View fails to update after changes in the directory” issue. See git commit 74b0d33a.
• Bug 310770: Use the correct default settings for Nepomuk. See git commits 530c743a, fe4bb558, review request 107464.
• Bug 304299: Use only one application instance when opening multiple files if possible. See git commit e45a847d, review request 107305.
• Bug 311782: Do not show “Directory loading has been cancelled” message if an error occurs. See git commit 07ee7c06, review request 107787.
• Use the new Nepomuk2::MetaDataWidget for the Information Panel, which provides many improvements compared to KFileMetaDataWidget. See git commits 487d6dd5, da5b7dcd, 32d5e287.
• Fix crash when browsing contents of Bluetooth device. See git commit 90c7fd40.
• Bugs 262464, 312812, 313992: Show file names in plain text, even if the file name contains HTML tags. See git commits 4e6d2d84, e27c4b3a, f05e18db, 8a97ca66, review requests 108291, 108336, 108307, 108584. Nice example that shows how tricky it can be to get something right that looks extremely trivial.
• Bug 312679: Fix crash when sorting by “Date” and the modification time of some files is close to a shift to/from daylight saving time. See git commit 715f00a9, review request 108309. This was actually caused by the new parallel sorting algorithm – it turned out that comparing dates is not reentrant.
• Bug 311794: Show correct duration for audio files. See git commit d23631d0, review request 108281.
• Bug 314338: Do not delay the popup menu when clicking the “Create New” toolbar button. See git commit 4d9af664, review request 108397.
• Bug 290736: Select the correct item as the new current item after deleting files. See git commit 14e5ba5b, review request 108356.
• Bug 302264: Fix crash when showing version-controlled directories. See git commit a9d7ebbc, review request 107656.
• Use the correct icon size in the “Edit places entry” dialog. See git commit 99f200d2, review request 108443.
• Bug 313151: Allow “timeline” URLs as homepage. See git commit 87a4eb9e, review request 108428.
• Bug 313466: Make the “A folder cannot be dropped into itself” message less intrusive. See git commit c1051731, review request 108483.
• Do not update Nepomuk data more often than necessary. See git commit af280715, review request 108543.

Those who have not upgraded to Dolphin 2.2 yet can enjoy at least the bug fixes that are also in the last bug fix update for Dolphin 2.1:

• Bug 311092: Fix a random crash when closing Dolphin. See git commit 5343a18b.
• Bug 287829: Sort file names correctly when renaming multiple files. See git commit 3a9b3271, review request 107718.
• Bug 294445: Fix problems when renaming a directory which is currently open in the view. See git commit 8141788c.
• Bugs 240820, 308597: Fix problems when renaming a file, and the new name contains a slash. See git commit fb190faa, review request 107681.
• Bug 311246: Fix crash when pasting files. See git commit 6d0f9ada.
• Bug 311206: Rename Inline keyboard focus. See git commit 620f9670, review request 107606.
• Bug 311214: Do not open XML-based office files as folder. See git commit 73283f13.

Thanks!

These changes were made possible by the following people who helped by submitting or testing patches, analysing tricky issues, or providing extremely useful bug reports that made finding even the root cause of mysterious bugs easy: Adrián Chaves Fernández, Andrea Scarpino, Christophe Giboudeaux, David Faure, Emmanuel Pescosta, Hugo Pereira Da Costa, Johann Bergles, Kai Uwe Broulik, Michael Jansen, Sandro Mani, Simeon Bird, Vishesh Handa, and Xuetian Weng. If I forgot anyone, please let me know!

But these are not the only people who helped during the last weeks. Burkhard Lück did a great job keeping the manual up to date, and Christoph Feck and Jekyll Wu deal with a large part of the incoming bug reports. And without translators, the release team, packagers, and sysadmins, we would not be able to ship Dolphin to you.

Recent mailing list problems

This is just a short notification for anyone who tried to subscribe to or send a message to the kfm-devel mailing list recently. These actions have probably failed because there was a configuration problem last week. Its origin is unclear to me, but thanks to Ben Cooksley from our awesome sysadmin team, the problem has been found and fixed.

If you tried to

• subscribe to the list, but did not get a confirmation message, or
• send a message to the list which did not get through (you can check this in the list archives)

during the last 10 days, please just try again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

How to make Dolphin crash less, and other changes in KDE 4.9.4

A few weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and could not sleep (fortunately, this happens very rarely). I took the advice that I once read, got up and tried to do something useful. I checked my e-mail and found a new bug report about a random crash that had been reported many times before, but whose cause had always been a mystery. Therefore, I was quite excited when I saw that this report contained step-by-step instructions to reproduce the crash. Once I could use GDB and Valgrind to investigate the crash, fixing it was easy (while handling events, never ever delete a QObject unless you are 100% sure that no event is waiting to be delivered to that object). Many thanks to G. Christ for making this fix possible!

In other news, David Faure fixed a bug in KDirLister that sometimes caused Dolphin to not notice changes in the current directory. This bug had been discussed intensively in Dolphin’s forum, and this discussion actually led to the discovery of a reliable way to trigger the problem.

Here is a summary of other changes in KDE 4.9.4:

• Bug 310465: Fix failure to switch the view mode in directories where the .directory file is not writable or readable. See git commit 56407d94, review request 107458.
• Bug 308018: Fix crash when clicking a context menu entry while renaming an item. See git commit 951cb9c3.
• Bug 217575: Select all pasted files in the view, even if the paste operation was interrupted by a ‘File exists’ dialog. See git commit b25059e8, review request 107237.
• Bug 304615, bug 296802: Don’t show files as ‘cut’ any more if the clipboard contents change. See git commits 41208058 and 59908290, review request 107390.
• Bug 309498: Make the Play/Stop button in the Infomation Panel use the correct icon size. See git commit cc069353.
• Bug 211472: Fix the problem that changes in directories are not noticed sometimes. See git commit 75da8e81.
• Bug 310579, bug 282257: Fix a frequently reported random crash. See git commit a6f07452.

Ben Cooksley, Christoph Feck, David Faure, Emmanuel Pescosta, G. Christ, Jaime Torres, Jekyll Wu, and Kai Uwe Broulik provided patches or other helpful information that helped to fix these bugs, or helped by testing the patches.

Unfortunately, some regressions made it into the final KDE 4.9.4 packages (two in Dolphin, bug 311206 and bug 311246, and one in kdelibs: bug 311214). Our apologies go to users of KDE 4.9.4 who were or still are suffering from these problems. We fixed them immediately after they were reported, and some of the packagers, who do a fantastic job each month to bring a new bug fix release to our users, have even provided updated KDE 4.9.4 packages, which means that you might not see these regressions at all on your system. If you build KDE from source, you can apply the patches attached to this message to fix the problems. Again, sorry for the trouble and thanks to everyone who helped to fix them.

Regressions are a huge annoyance for everyone, so I’ll make sure that those parts of Dolphin that can easily be broken by accident will have a better unit test coverage in the future. For those who don’t know what unit tests are: when building Dolphin (or many other parts of KDE) from source, you can not only run cmake, make, and make install, but also ‘make test’ to perform an automated check of the basic functionality.

Also manual testing can help a lot: if you use the 4.9 or master branches or packages made from them, you update them frequently, and you notice anything that suddenly stops working, report it as soon as possible. Then we can look at the problem and make sure that it is fixed before the next release. Early feedback has often helped to identify such problems, but not everyone uses the software in the same way, and it’s impossible for one person to test her/his typical use cases every day. The more testing we get before the release, the better the result will be.

On the way to Dolphin 2.2

KDE 4.10 Beta 1 has been released this week, so I thought it would be nice to summarize the changes that went into the master branch during the last few months. Here is a current screenshot that shows some of them:

New Features

• Àlex Fiestas added support for MTP devices (like phones) to the Places Panel, making use of Philipp Schmidt’s MTP kioslave. Check if your distribution provides packages for kio-mtp if you want to try it. I’m quite happy that I can finally transfer files to and from my phone easily in KDE (if you wonder why it shows up twice in the panel: that’s because the phone’s internal memory and the SD card are separate devices). See Àlex’ blog post (which also provides information about building kio-mtp yourself) and the review request for more information.
• Amandeep Singh, assisted by Frederik Gladhorn, implemented accessibility features in Dolphin. Now you can have the current item shown zoomed in KMag.
• Some people missed an easy way to resize the icons in the Places Panel in KDE 4.9. For those who didn’t know: Dophin’s Places Panel had been rewritten, and the automatic resizing of the icons when the panel was resized (or in some other situations, like when a ‘Place’ with a long name was created or removed) was dropped. We now have an ‘Icon Size’ submenu in the panel’s context menu, just like in the tool bar. I think that this is the best solution: users who want bigger icons can just choose their favourite size.
• Dolphin 1.x provided two different ways to rename files: ‘inline renaming’ and renaming using a dialog. This changed some time ago due to the view engine rewrite. In KDE 4.8, inline renaming was not ready yet. In KDE 4.9, it replaced the dialog completely (except for the case that multiple files are renamed at the same time), but some people actually got used to the dialog and missed it. In KDE 4.10, you will be able to choose again. Emmanuel Pescosta added a checkbox to the settings dialog.
• Ivan Čukić made it possible to report the current directory to the activity manager, such that it can easily tell what your most favourite directories are. You can disable this in the System Settings, ‘Workspace Behavior’ if you don’t want the activity manager to keep a log of your directories and documents.

Performance Improvements

Emmanuel Pescosta worked hard to make Dolphin faster:

• The part of Dolphin that keeps track of the previews that need to be generated did not handle its internal data structures in the most efficient way. Look at the review request for details and for the impressive Callgrind data.
• Loading a folder with many files can be very slow. It turns out that much of this slowness is due to the “natural sorting” of the items, which makes sure that “image10.jpg” comes after “image9.jpg”, and not between “image1.jpg” and “image2.jpg”. There have been some ideas how the “natural comparison” of two file names can be made faster, but this requires a lot of work. In KDE 4.10, we still use the old comparison function, but make use of all CPU cores on your system to keep the delay when opening a large directory short. Look at the final version of the patch to see how little code you need to make Mergesort use multiple threads with QtConcurrent!
• The icons which are shown for files and folders if previews are disabled are now cached to save CPU cycles and memory.

More little improvements

• Panos Kanavos improved the ‘More Options’/'Less Options’ button in the ‘Search’ bar and added some text to make it more obvious what the button is about.
• If “Open folders during drag operations” is enabled, you can now drag items to an entry in the Places Panel. If you keep the mouse buggon pressed and wait a bit, the URL will be opened in the view.
• The ‘Recently Accessed’ entries in the Places Panel now have individual icons thanks to Weng Xuetian. Note that you might not see those new icons unless you create a new user or you remove the ‘timeline’ entries from .kde4/share/apps/kfileplaces/bookmarks.xml manually (As far as I know, there is no good way to change this automatically without deleting any custom icons that users might have chosen. If you do not see any icons at all for these entries, this is because Dolphin in earlier KDE 4.9.x versions unfortunately used an icon that was not available for all distros).
• The parts of Dolphin that interact with Nepomuk have now been ported to Nepomuk 2.
• Middle-clicking a directory in one of the panels now loads it in a background tab to be more consistent with other parts of Dolphin where directories can be middle-clicked.
• Ctrl+L now selects the URL in the location bar, like in web browsers. If you only want to focus the location bar, you can use F6 (the effect of these shortcuts has just been exchanged).
• Clicking ‘Cancel’ in an authentication dialog now causes an error message to be shown in Dolphin, rather than an endless ‘Loading folder…’ message.

The improvements in Dolphin 2.2 were made possible by the following people who contributed patches, provided advice on patches while they were still work-in-progress, and tested features early to report problems and regressions: Alex Fiestas, Amandeep Singh, Christoph Feck, Emmanuel Pescosta, Frederik Gladhorn, Hrvoje Senjan, Ivan Čukić, Jekyll Wu, Kai-Uwe Broulik, Panos Kanavos, Vishesh Handa, and Weng Xuetian. Thanks for your help! If I forgot anyone, please let me know.

If you test Dolphin and find any regressions (or old bugs which haven’t been reported yet), please report them at https://bugs.kde.org/.