Woohoo! Once again, the KDE project will be participating in Google's Summer of Code activities. Both Jason and Adriaan will be mentors to help students as they give some much-needed love to KDE. Jason will be mentoring Bertjan in doing some much-needed refactoring and conduit cleanup and redesign in KPilot, and Adriaan will be the mentor for the KAider (computer-aided translation system) project. A fun time will be had by all...

The development roadmap has been updated with plans for april and may. Since KPilot will be (re)merged into KDE4, we have a lot of work to do, suddenly. People porting KPilot to KDE4 will be more welcome than ever.

We squashed some consistency bugs between auto* and CMake recently, and Jason has continued to be diligent in hunting down the bugs that are reported -- in excruciating detail -- by our friend perplexity. This word also describes the state we were in on discovering this bug which KPilot may have to work around.

In other coding news, auto* and CMake builds now resemble each other more closely and unit tests continue to creep in to the codebase.

In order to distinguish our development versions from each other and to placate one of our avid testers who suggested the name, the current KPilot development version is called "4.9.1-pre2 (rabid dolphin)".

There are two KPilot branches right now, corresponding to the two KDE PIM branches: the regular KDE 3.5 branch (you get get KPilot from branches/KDE/3.5/kdepim/kpilot) and the KDE PIM 3.5+ branch (branches/work/kdepim-3.5.5+/kpilot).

Now kpilot is in the SVN repository of kde again (see 2006-12-09), it has a new release. Say hi to kpilot 4.9.0 depth9. It has several improvements and bugfixes. An important change is the new minimum requirement for pilot-link which has changed to version 0.12.0. A more complete list of bugs that are fixed is:

• Raising minimum requirement for kpilot to pilot-link 0.12.0. This addresses many long-standing bugs caused by previous versions of pilot-link regarding database-size limitations. See SVN commit 611839.
• Fixes for data-loss problems for users of all distros that distributed kpilot with pilot-link 0.12 (Ubuntu, Mandrake, and Debian amongst others). See SVN commit 611839.
• Fix for "Reminders from outlook invites are set to unknown in exchange resources". Fixes bug 136954. See SVN commit 614667.
• Fix compilation when NDEBUG is on. Fixes bug 137928. See SVN commit 619524.

We also added some goodies to the new version. One of them is that it's now possible to build kpilot standalone using cmake. For more information about that read the INSTALL file that comes with the source. vanRijn did some work on backups. He made the backup options made more granular. Users can choose to always update backups or to only do so on demand, instead of being forced to do so on every HotSync. As you can see kpilot is still under development. Do you want to try the latest version? We're currently working in the kdepim+ branch. But be warned, as Adriaan says: "current pim+ branch very hazardous"