I like to cook. And sometimes store my recipes. Over the years I have tried KRecipes, kept my recipes in BasKet notes, in KJots notes, in more or less random word processor documents.

I liked the free form entering recipes in various notes applications and word processor documents, but I lacked some kind of indexing them. What I wanted was free-ish text for writing recipes, and some thing that could help me find them by tags I give them. By Title. By how I organize them. And maybe by Ingredient if I don’t know how to get rid of the soon-to-be-bad in my refridgerator.

Given I’m a software developer, maybe I should try scratch my own itch. And I did in the last month and a half during some evenings. This is also where my latest Qt and modern C++ blog posts comes from

The central bit is basically a markdown viewer, and the file format is some semi structured markdown in one file per recipe. Structured in the file system however you like it.

There is a recipes index which simply is a file system view with pretty titles on top.

There is a way to insert tags into recipes.

I can find them by title.

And I can find recipes by ingredients.

Given it is plain text, it can easily be synced using Git or NextCloud or whatever solution you want for that.

You can give it a spin if you want. It lives here https://cgit.kde.org/scratch/sune/kookbook.git/. There is a blueprint for a windows installer here: https://phabricator.kde.org/D12828

There is a markdown file describing the specifics of the file format. It is not declared 100% stable yet, but I need good reasons to break stuff.

My recipe collection is in my native language Danish, so I’m not sure sharing it for demo purposes makes too much sense.

The other day, some user of Extra CMake Modules (A collection of utilities and find modules created by KDE), asked if there was an easy way to query cmake for wherever the KDEInstallDirs points to (KDEInstallDirs is a set of default paths that mostly is good for your system, iirc based upon GNUInstallDirs but with some extensions for various Qt, KDE and XDG common paths, as well as some cross platform additions). I couldn’t find an easy way of doing it without writing a couple of lines of CMake code.

Getting the KDE_INSTALL_(full_)APPDIR with default options is:

and various other options can be set as well.

This is kind of simple, but let’s just share it with the world:

I don’t think it is complex enough to claim any sorts of copyrights, but if you insist, you can use it under one of the following licenses: CC0, Public Domain (if that’s in your juristiction), MIT/X11, WTFPL (any version), 3-clause BSD, GPL (any version), LGPL (any version) and .. erm. whatever.

I was trying to get it to work as a cmake -P script, but some of the find_package calls requires working CMakeCache. Comments welcome.

I recently did a short tongue-in-cheek blog post about Qt and modern C++. In the comments, people discovered that several compilers effectively can optimize std::make_unique<>().release() to a simple new statement, which was kind of a surprise to me.

I have recently written a new program from scratch (more about that later), and I tried to force myself to use standard library smartpointers much more than what I normally have been doing.

I ended up trying to apply a set of rules for memory handling to my code base to try to see where it could end.

• No naked delete‘s
• No new statements, unless it was handed directly to a Qt function taking ownership of the pointer. (To avoid sillyness like the previous one)
• Raw pointers in the code are observer pointers. We can do this in new code, but in older code it is hard to argue that.

It resulted in code like

By it self, it is quite ok to work with, and we get all ownership transfers documented. So maybe we should start code this way.

But there is also a hole in the ownership pass around, but given Qt methods doesn’t throw, it shouldn’t be much of a problem.

More about my new fancy / boring application at a later point.

I still haven’t fully embraced the c++17 thingies. My mental baseline is kind of the compiler in Debian Stable.

– ’cause raw new’s are bad.

A couple of years ago, I made a blog post, KDE makes Qt, with data about which percentage of Qt contributions came from people starting in KDE. Basically, how many Qt contributions are made by people who used KDE as a “gateway” drug into it.

I have now updated the graphs with data until the end of September 2017:

Many of these changes are made by people not directly as a result of their KDE work, but as a result of their paid work. But this doesn’t change the fact that KDE is an important project for attracting contributors to Qt, and a very good place to find experienced Qt developers.

After a bit of a debugging session, I ended up looking at some code in a large project

The connection gets removed when the pointer inside m_foo gets de-allocated by the shared_ptr.
But the connection target is a lambda that has captured a copy of the shared_ptr…

There is at least a couple of solutions.

• Keep the connection object (QMetaObject::Connection) around and call disconnect in your destructor. That way the connection gets removed and the lamda object should get removed
• Capture the shared pointer by (const) reference. Capture the shared pointer as a weak pointer. Or as a raw pointer. All of this is safe because whenever the shared pointer gets a refcount of zero, the connection gets taken down with the object.

I guess the lesson learnt is be careful when capturing shared pointers.