Not just Krita at the 2018 Krita Sprint

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At the 2018 Krita Sprint we had a special guest: Valeriy Malov, the maintainer of the Plasma Wacom tablet settings module. We've asked him to write about his experience at the sprint, so over to him!

Hello,

This is my Krita 2018 sprint report and general report / pre-release announcement for new version of wacomtablet.

Krita 2018 sprint

A couple of weeks ago I've attended the Krita sprint, it was a both fun and productive event. Boudewijn, Timothee and Raghukamath have tested the git version of wacomtablet on their computers. I've also tested a handful of wacom devices with the KCM, got some user input, and made a few fixes:

I want to thank Boudewijn and Irina for hosting the sprint, and Krita Foundation and KDE e.V. for sponsoring the event. Without them those issues probably wouldn't get fixed anytime soon.

On new release and testing

There's also been a major change since 3.0.0: libwacom support. This should increase the number of devices we support out of the box. However, it's only partial for now (no LED support yet, no multiple USB ID devices yet, libwacom-supplied button schemes don't fit very well in current UI). It also requires libwacom 0.29 for devices with quirky buttons (you can still build with older libwacom, but it will be much less useful). So don't throw away "Wacom Tablet Finder" yet.

Another small change is that logging have been ported to QLoggingCategory, which means that for enabling debug logs you need to run kdebugsettings and look for "wacom".

With all these changes I'm going to make a 3.1.0 branch soon, which means that a release should happen this month. Most important bug fixes since 3.0.0 are hard to backport, so most likely there will be no 3.0.1, sorry. There will be no beta release either (Neon Dev Unstable, Arch and Gentoo already provide git builds for testing).

Known issues:

There's also a handful of issues that are kept open for now, but after release of 3.1.0 I'll eventually close some of them as I consider them fixed, unless anyone confirms otherwise:

Full list of open bugs/wishes here.

Do not hesitate opening a bug if you encounter an issue. If no new issues will surface after the 3.1.0 release, usability improvements is probably the next priority for the project.

On packaging

This is a sort of very important topic which I can't do much about directly. Currently, wacom support in KDE is an optional component, so if Tablet section is missing from Input Devices settings, you need to install it. Package usually goes by name wacomtablet or kcm-wacomtablet. You can check if your distribution packages it here and here. As far as I know, only KDE Neon, Arch (+derivatives) and Gentoo provide up-to-date package for wacomtablet right now. Kubuntu has it too, but it's hidden in experimental PPA. If you're using something else, your options are:

Unfortunately due to how the project is structured (it's just a bunch of plugins), I don't think I can build an AppImage for everyone to use. So the best way to get it in your distribution is letting distribution maintainers know that it exists and you need it to be packaged.