Similar to the Google Summer of Code, the KDE project organizes the programming competition Season of KDE (SoK for short) every year. The current issue started on December 15 of last year and ended with the presentation of the results. One focus was on the energy measurement of KDE software.
KDE: Sustainable Applications
In order to be able to measure the energy consumption of their own programs more easily and reproducibly, the KDE team the tool KdeEcoTest developed. It runs scripts that simulate or mimic the (click) behavior of a typical user. If you measure the required energy during a script run, you get the power consumption that can probably be expected later for the application. As part of the SoK 2023, two students took on KdeEcoTest.
Mohamed Ibrahim first revised the documentation, cleaned up the code and contributed a few more functions. Scripts can now also simulate drag-and-drop actions. Rudraksh Karpe, on the other hand, improved the test scripts for the Gcompris educational software collection and the Kate text editor. The primary goal here was to prepare for the certification for the Blue Angel. So far, only the Okular document viewer has received the promotionally effective eco-label. Rudraksh Karpe has also developed a tool that uses the log files generated by KdeEcoTest to generate an overview of the actions carried out and the times required for them.
Nitin Tejuja also dedicated himself to Gcompris, but did not have the user actions simulated by KdeEcoTest, but by the Selenium framework and the AT-SPI2 interface, which was actually intended for screen readers. The KDE developers see this approach as an interesting alternative to KdeEcoTest: the currently emerging Selenium AT SPI interface for Qt would then be interesting not only as a unit test tool, but also for energy measurement at the same time. Other KDE developers can use Nitin Tejuja’s work or scripts as a guide for their own projects.
Improved usability
Other students improved the operation of individual KDE applications. Thanks to Brannon Aw, you can use the Spectacle screenshot tool to erase annotations that you accidentally drew on the image. Ruoqing He taught the digital clock widget to clearly display the holidays in the calendar. Theophile Gilgien gave the YouTube client AudioTube a volume control in the maximized version. In addition, individual songs can be removed from the history.
For the search function of the mastodon client Tokodon, Rishi Kumar wrote further software tests aimed at accessibility using Selenium. Finally, Neelaksh Singh improved the automatic building of Flatpak packages for the KDE applications. In the Summary of the Season of KDE 2023 the KDE project explains the goals and steps to get there.
Similar to the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), the Season of KDE project aims to support students. However, Google has now broadened the target group for the GSoC.
(dmk)