Samat Says Samat Jain's personal weblog

There’s been a bit of turmoil in the Amarok and KDE communities the past week with Amarok’s decision to only support MySQL Embedded in Amarok 2. Jeff Mitchell has written about the Amarok design decisions made.

I’m a little bothered by this, as it forgeos all the “semantic desktop” work that has gone into KDE 4, namely what’s provided by the Strigi and Nepomuk libraries. One thing the whole semantic desktop concept entails is that other applications will be able use data another application stored, but without care to what that other application was or how it was stored. For example, I should be able to share the list of all tracks in my music library, how many times I’ve played tracks, what tracks I think are my favorite, etc across music players. This kind of abstraction is, obviously, good for users, but bad for developers of proprietary software. They don’t want you to easily switch between applications that they do not control. Amarok switching to it’s own database store is a stab at this kind of desktop interoperability. I’ve my own thoughts to add, though, that support what the developers are doing…

Amarok is an awesome application. Dare I say, it’s a killer application on Linux—on several occasions this past year I’ve recommended people install Linux just so that they could play with Amarok and see how much better it is compared to what they were using (yes, I’m looking at you, iTunes).

Before Amarok, I used Music Player Daemon (mpd). I stopped using it after a while: the playlist management wasn’t very good; it would eat those playlists that I spent a lot of effort to make; the GUIs available at the time were lacking; and it was very slow when working with tens of thousands of songs. Some of this may have changed but I’ve not been motivated to look back.

Enter Amarok: I switched because the playlist management was so much better. I setup a MySQL server on my workstation to store metadata, as SQLite was much too slow. Amarok backed with MySQL is very fast—I dare others to find a library-based music manager that is faster with the number of songs I’ve thrown at it.

Balancing desktop interoperability with performance is a delicate balancing act. Interoperability is the hot thing these days—look at how Apple’s line of integrated software and hardware continue to sip market share from the Microsoft-powered desktop. But when it comes down to it, performance and other more perceived benefits are going to win out over desktop interoperability. The Amarok developers’ decision to go with MySQL embedded is a good one that will hopefully keep people moving to Amarok over proprietary alternatives.

This past Ubucon’s key signing party was my first key signing party. One thing I noticed–signing keys after a key signing party is a boring repetitive task. Summarized from the Ubuntu wiki entry on typical key signing post-party protocol:

1. Retrieve all public keys of key signing party participants, using gpg –-recv-key
2. Compare the hardcopy fingerprint from the keysigning party to the fingerprint of the retrieved public keys, using gpg –-fingerprint
3. Sign the key, using gpg –-sign Send the signed key back, either by
   • E-mail: export the key, then e-mail it to the key owner, using gpg –-export -a | mail -s “Your signed key” user@example.com
   • Key server: send the key to a public keyserver, using gpg –send-keys

This is incredibly monotonous—and people have to wonder why Web of Trust-based encryption is not more popular?

The Debian signing-party package provides the utility caff to automate some of this. It’s not very friendly to “desktop” users, however:

• it’s a CLI application
• it requires a local MTA (/usr/sbin/sendmail in particular), or an “open” SMTP server, with no support for authenticated SMTP or SMTP/SSL
• the configuration file syntax is Perl and confusing; there are also few examples on the Internet

You could add authenticated SMTP or SMTP/SSL support to the script, but having to know how to hack Perl definitely disqualifies caffe from being a desktop-friendly application.

So, I hacked together my own key signing party script in Python that would send signed keys back to people via KMail. To use it, create a text file listing all key IDs you wish to sign, one per line. Pipe the contents of this list into the script:

The script will download each key, ask you to verify the fingerprint, and then sign it. It then will open a KMail composer window, pre-filled with the key owner’s e-mail address, a friendly template message (customizable in the script), and attached key. Review each e-mail to make sure it is kosher, and click send. Other than continuing to be a CLI program, I think this is much friendlier–the only manual work done is the creation of list of keys to sign, comparing fingerprints (this could be automated, but it seems in the spirit of the Web of Trust-based systems not to), and clicking send in a familiar desktop e-mail client.

Now for some notes…

It uses the DCOP automation features of KDE’s Kmail to send messages. You could similarly use Evolution and D-Bus, but I don’t use Evolution so I can’t contribute that bit of functionality. Mozilla’s Thunderbird unfortunately does not yet support any kind of automation features (as far as I know, anyway), so you’re completely out of luck if you use it.

DCOP with Python is a complete, utter, pain. The easy way to drag-and-drop boiler-plate code with kdcop did not work, as it appears the APIs have changed. A problem with KDE/Python dcopext’s module and multiple identically-named-functions sealed the deal for me and I gave up trying to use DCOP with Python, and instead settled for a hack of using the shell instead. I’m looking forward the one Linux desktop IPC protocol to rule them all, D-Bus, to debut in KDE4.

My script does not provide all the functionality of caffe. It, for example, does not encrypt the messages and their keys back to their owners. There doesn’t appear to be an easy way to do this with KMail and DCOP, so it’s a feature that will have to wait.

There’s been a lot of fallout from Linus’ latest criticism of the GNOME desktop, with which I complete agree. I feel as if I need to comment on some of the responses.

Carthik Sharma writes in Of Apples and Oranges, GNOME and KDE:

I dread having to find something, since it most definitely will be placed in some non-intuitive sub-menu.

KDE has no control over where applications decide to place themselves.

I like the way GNOME display fonts on the screen. I don’t want to have to change every little variable to get the perfect system.

GNOME pioneered use of fontconfig; in fact, lately, GNOME has been pioneering the use of many next-gen APIs and technologies (e.g. AIGLX, Beryl, etc). But Qt/KDE have also been using fontconfig for several years now—what’s different?

Interesting enough, there has been criticism about how GNOME handles fonts. Taking points from that article, GNOME’s font configuration is a mess:

• What’s a “Terminal” font (it should be called “Monospace,” as it is in KDE, because this is how it’s also used throughout GNOME)?
• What does “size” mean (apparently, it’s not what you think)?
• Why do I care about the subpixel ordering of my fonts’ antialiasing?
• Why would I need to set fonts at all (see my weblog entry The GNOME font dialog, why?)?

KDE is no different than GNOME in trying to provide “sensible” defaults, defaults that its developers have decided are intrinsic to a “perfect desktop.” But, what the developers have decided is the perfect desktop may not be your perfect desktop—and here lies the essence of Linus’ argument, and the difference with KDE and GNOME. With KDE, you may have an option to make a setup “perfect”; with GNOME, quite often the option won’t exist and you are limited to what the powers that be decided was perfect for them, not you. This is Linus’ argument: GNOME is limiting.