The topic that kept us busy the most was success and failure, after a while we concluded that no one want to speak of failure, so we concentrated on what we consider is going to be our main criteria of success, the top mains one are lot of users and lot of developers. Our first step to get a lot of users will be to make it possible for a lot of users to use it (surprised ?), the good thing is that is indeed something that is progressing release after release. Then we will need a lot of advertisement and documentation. When it comes to developers, we concluded that the main problem is not to attract new ones, but to retain the one we have, and one of the key challenge is going to make sure we keep a good ratio of paid developers / hobbyist developers. A key feature of KOffice is going to be interoperability, and ODF is the way to go. Some ODF features are border lines and are not considered to be essential, but if someone is willing to write an implementation, it might be accepted by KOffice if it is good enough (code quality, maintainability and UI). Also an other way to achieve interoperability is with the implementation of import filters. Then the question of whether KOffice is a desktop application or also for use on mobile devices was raised, but this is a subject that require research on how to make the actual implementation. Suresh mentioned that Nokia would need a roadmap to help with their planning, which also require a vision, but writing a vision require an usability expert and the roadmap would have taken us an other day.

Then we continued with listing the missing features in KOffice, Suresh presented us their current work on mobile use of KOffice. And we finished by a discussion about our website, sadly Alexandra who did a wonderful job on planning our current website is now too busy to work on it, so for now I am going to take care of technical aspect, while Boudewijn writes content (expect a last week in koffice !).

The full minutes are fully available on koffice’s wiki.

For the dinner we went to the slowest restaurant, half an hour for the first drink and to order, an hour to get the food…

And now we enjoy the fresh evening, while blogging, sipping wine, hacking and discussing.

This raise the question of how productive we will be, as you can see below Boudewijn and Thorsten are already at work reviewing a patch on loading and saving text on shape, and we started informal discussions:

Now almost everybody has arrived, and is enjoying the wifi, in the garden. With more discussion, blogging, bug hunting, and listening to the history of castle told by Boudewijn.

In the technical area, I and Dmitry had a long talk on how to improve the filter API, to make it both easier to write effect filters, retain performance and ensure that it is less buggy with respect to selections and masks. In meantime Lukas was teaching Vera how to implement new painting operation, so that she can work on a water color brush engine.

When it came to the UI, we talked about what to do with painting op presets preview, and it was decided that it would be more useful for the user to have a scratchpad where he can make his own testing of the current settings, rather than having a computer generated preview. Boudewijn is now working on implementing exactly that. We also discussed painting presets management, it is going to be very basic for 2.2, with just a list name and a preview (either computer generated or made with the scratchpad). And later we would like to have tags, search by tags.

And between two discussions, we were working on bug fixes, polishing features, etc… All the small details to make Krita an even better application. And now is the hack week, with Boudewijn, Lukas, Sven and me.

We decided to focus on painting, sketching, comic books and texturing. As well as making an application for high-end painters. The question of how much the digital painting should mimick real-world painting, and based on our experience of watercolor in 1.6 that was so advanced that it would simulate the drying itself, we decided that real world should be an inspiration, but that there is no point to make digital painting exactly like real world, if you want real world, you can just take a real brush and paint. But it does not mean that we should take inspiration in real physics, when it makes sense, like for color mixing.

In the end, it took us more than two hours to define the following vision:


Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters.

Modelled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with snappy response.


It does not mean you cannot use Krita for something else, or develop plug-ins that solve a problem that does not fit the vision. But it means that we are going to be focused on implementing that vision, and that the default of the application will be oriented toward that vision. And when we have to make choices, we will look at the vision and see which decision makes more sense for the vision.

After the lunch, we took a digestive walk in Deventer streets:

Then we discussed about finding GSoC ideas, that would help to implement our vision, and concluded that a new transform tool and a good UI to access ressources was the two main ideas we needed. Then everybody went back to his computer, to fix bugs, to discuss UI ideas, and just to make Krita “the best application ever” (Vera’s tm).

Boudewijn explained us about the past of the city, and also which building was going to be demolished, and what nice house has been replaced by an ugly one. We walked a long many nice streets like this one:

Below is a church that was build by the city inhabitant that were denied access to the cathedral, now it is used as a concert hall:

Then we arrived at the market place, where a krita developer took a picture of a krita developer taking a picture of an other krita developer:

Upon our return to Boudewijn’s house the electricity was not back, but Vera had arrived, so we headed to the nearby Church basement which had electricity but no Internet connection. I first tried to work on making OpenGTL’s API nicer to use, while Lukas worked on importing ABR brush from recent photoshop version with the help of Vera, Dmitry worked on layer stack recomposition, while Boudewijn tried to fix a thread bug that seems to only happen on Vera’s computer.

Now electricity is back in the house, Peter and Sven have arrived, and we are finally connected again, and are planning to go in a pizza restaurant in the evening. And now Adam has arrived too. So we are all there now.

The last main topic was about making KOffice ready for end-users. And we decided to define a few use cases with an associated users for each application. And then list the features they need, and what kind of issues they face. While Krita is getting focused on being useful for the artist behind Blender movies. Of course, the biggest challenge is now to find developers resources to implement all this ideas and fixes.

This was the last topic on the general session. Afterward hacking started again, as well as specific discussion between a small group of developers. For instance, the Krita team (or what was left of it after the departure of Dmitry) started a discussion on redesigning our painting operation settings, which are currently a bit messy between GUI elements, and settings used for painting.

And now people are either gone, compiling KOffice on windows or almost asleep.

Then we decided to have the 2.2 release on a six monthes schedule, with a release in May, and to experiment a short 4 monthes schedule for 2.3. To be efficient such a schedule require a move to Git, and the ability to work on different branches and only merge what is ready. The main objection to such a schedule was whether it is not too many releases for end users, the advantage is that we solve the problem of schedules alignment with distributions.

Then we had a presentation from the Nokia guys on their work on an Office viewer for Maemo, what they achieved and what they need to have fixed (just 600 bugs…) to consider it end-user ready. And then we talk on how to integrate their work in the community.

Then we went for sandwiches at the Nokia cafeteria.

We started the afternoon with a discussion on how to improve decision making inside the community. The important thing is that we want to take decisions based on a concensus, which require to have people working on finding a solution instead of defending their current solution. But in the end, if there is still a disagreement, we decided that shared component (library and base plugins) would have three maintainers that take the final decision.

In the afternoon, Olivier Goffart gave a presentation on library design, which is interesting since we are planning to export some of our libraries and offer API/ABI stability.

Then we had hacking times, with people fixing bugs, talking design and other discussing on our library organisation.

Then we were invited by Nokia for a pizza party at a nearby restaurant. And concluded the evening with a Krita meeting in the lobby of the hotel.

The topic of the meeting is mostly about finalizing the KOffice libraries, with API reviews with Qt Developers, probably some bug fixing and unit testing. As well as a few “administrative” discussion, like release schedules.