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KSquares 0.1KEduca
November 15th, 2007Yesterday in the #kde-edu IRC channel, I witnessed the following conversation:
<piacentini> Another guy was consterned when I told you about KEduca not being in 4.0
<piacentini> He says he used it already for test with more than 45,000 students
<annma> oh
<annma> really?
<piacentini> And he changed his lecture when I told you this
<annma> 
<piacentini> Gonna tell people that they need to colaborate, participate, or products can die
<annma> yes
<annma> whenever we looked at KEduca it did not work
<piacentini> I hinted (he works on a government) that he could even sponsor someone to work on it
<annma> but if we had use cases we would have fix it
<piacentini> Yes, I asked him for a list of things he likes, things he does not like, what he uses
<piacentini> And we talked a bit about it
<piacentini> He says (really) that he estimates that the state has saved R$ 15.000 in printing when he switched to KEduca tests
<piacentini> That is about U$10.000
<piacentini> per quarter
<piacentini> Notice that these are tests applied on free courses to a poor community, where they train people in free software and also in other stuff like mechanics, cooking, etc
<piacentini> So for this sort of feedback events like this are good imo, hopefully he will get back to me, and we can use this story to motivate someone to port KEduca to KDE4, and address its shortcomings. I got moved, but my plate is more than full for now 
And well, I can say that this story did motivate me and I immediately started work on porting KEduca to KDE4. Now somehow, it had managed to evade any sort of porting effort thusfar so my work was more than cut out for me.
However, a day later and I’ve got the main application compiling and here’s the proof:
As you can see, the menubars are a bit screwed (in fact the Settings and File menus don’t even do anything) but that’s all just a matter of time I’m sure.
Now of course, it’s too late for KDE 4.0 but I’ll try to get it in shape for 4.1 and make some people in poor communities happy 
November 15th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Excellent - that’s good work you’re doing. Thanks for stepping up - kdeedu is looking more and more tasty by the day!
November 15th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
KEduca *needs* to be rewritten from scratch, not to be ported and conveted and so forth.
Porting an huge pile of messed and unmaintainable code is just a waste of time, better start from a new, fresh and better designed codebase.
But oh well, the time is always yours…
November 15th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
@pino
I will be rewriting vast swathes of it, yes. Much of it is obsolete or bitrotted code. The file format for saving tests will be changed and it has suggested to use an ODF format for this (not decided yet. I need to evaluate this).
It’s not such a large program that a rewrite would be too difficult. I haven’t wasted any time on porting code I know I will be replacing.
November 16th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Cool stuff!
To me it also sounds like there is a problem with communicating “free software” here, how you can participate in the process, or provide feedback to developers.. That’s not my expertise though, but something very visible in this example.
November 16th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
While I agree with pino that a somehow partial rewrite might be needed, for this guy specifically just having it working as it is now in KDE3 and shipping in KDE4 would be good enough. I asked specifically about bugs, and he had one or two issues (like sometimes the test adding a random question at the end), but according to him these are not showstoppers, at least in his community. Also a change in file format for saving results is something we talked about, but in his case notice that they do not even have a very good or reliable local network setup, so the current scheme is working for their needs. I will point him to this blog post, and let him know that our small conversation is beginning to bear fruits.
Matt: thanks a lot for this effort, and hopefully you will find time and motivation to do a cleanup for 4.1!
Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini