From 307dc1ac61e3e015b43acb6dd0726866f7db276d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Wolfgang Müller
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2024 21:16:48 +0200
Subject: content: Add post: "KDE Plasma 6 and two bugs"

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+date = 2024-09-18T21:16:12+02:00
+
+title = "KDE Plasma 6 and two bugs"
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["bugs"]
+
+[extra]
+related = []
++++
+
+For the last couple of months I have been running [sway](https://swaywm.org/) on
+my main desktop system after having been forced away from
+[hikari](https://hub.darcs.net/raichoo/hikari) because of its practically halted
+development and incompatibility with newer
+[wlroots](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/) versions.
+
+I never felt completely satisfied with it and the whole experience was rather
+joyless, so about a week ago I decided to give [KDE Plasma
+6](https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/) a try after a surprisingly
+decent experience on the [KDE Neon](https://neon.kde.org/) live image.
+
+Whilst undoubtedly greater in its complexity and code size than sway, to me
+Plasma 6 seems like one of the last decent desktop environments still remaining.
+It's incredibly customisable (but still comes with good defaults), looks nice
+out of the box, and most importantly seems to care about providing a nicely
+integrated and featureful experience. This even includes a companion app on
+Android, [KDE Connect](https://kdeconnect.kde.org/). It remains to be seen
+whether it will fully convince me in the long run, but for now I am very
+satisfied with it.
+
+{{ img(path="kde-plasma.png", alt="A picture of the KDE Plasma 6 desktop
+environment, with a browser window, a terminal, and an instance of Dolphin, a
+file manager.", caption="KDE Plasma 6 with a few windows open") }}
+
+This last week was mostly spent learning about the desktop environment and
+setting everything up exactly how I want it to be, but there were two notable
+bugs to squash as well.
+
+The first one reared its ugly head once I enabled backwards-compatibility with
+Qt5-based apps. I have a couple of such apps still, most prominently
+[Mumble](https://www.mumble.info/) and [Quassel IRC](https://quassel-irc.org/).
+Once the latter was built against the KFramework libraries, no more
+notifications were shown...
+
+Fixing this ended up taking about two days, most of which were spent discovering
+exactly how
+[KNotifications](https://api.kde.org/frameworks/knotifications/html/index.html)
+work. KDE provides apps with a tighter integration to the notification service,
+allowing users to specify which types of notifications to show, and how.
+Applications specify their notifications by shipping an `<app>.notifyrc` file.
+KDE ties this file to the application by matching its base name to the name
+given to the application (usually through a call to
+`QCoreApplication::applicationName` or when creating
+[KAboutData](https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kcoreaddons/html/classKAboutData.html)).
+
+It turns out that Quassel had recently been
+[patched](https://github.com/quassel/quassel/commit/020c163421691fa37330826df92ac0a248721290)
+to fix an issue where desktop environments did not show its icon correctly. This
+required a call to `setDesktopFileName` in `KAboutData` to make environments
+aware of the connection. However, Quassel's application name was
+[changed in the same commit](https://github.com/quassel/quassel/commit/020c163421691fa37330826df92ac0a248721290#diff-c72daad7d2269a2ee21584002ef1f30f4415335358a6c6f7e7296d3290a51a91R117),
+severing its link with the name given through its `quassel.notifyrc` file. This
+seems to have been done in addition to the `setDesktopFileName` call and was not
+necessary to solve the issue the commit was trying to address.
+
+I prepared a [pull request](https://github.com/quassel/quassel/pull/619) fixing
+this issue by reverting part of the offending commit.
+
+{{ img(path="notification.png", width=412, format="png", alt="A picture of a
+notification from Quassel IRC saying 'yay for notifications'.", caption="Glad to
+have these back") }}
+
+The second bug I randomly came across whilst perusing `journalctl` and seeing
+the following error from [Dolphin](https://apps.kde.org/dolphin/), KDE's file
+manager:
+
+    QString(View)::contains(): called on an invalid QRegularExpression object
+    (pattern is '\A(?:file:///home/wolf/[Z-A]/?)\z')
+
+Seeing this immediately made me wonder whether Dolphin plugs a URL straight into
+a regular expression without escaping it, and the answer, of course,
+[is yes](https://invent.kde.org/system/dolphin/-/blob/5c069471fccc41051b967be69f95655b3e0b73ef/src/dolphinviewcontainer.cpp#L554-557).
+I spent most of today's afternoon hunting this issue down and preparing a [merge
+request](https://invent.kde.org/system/dolphin/-/merge_requests/831) that fixes
+it in an elegant way.
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