*Below added by Jonathan Thomas*
Stable Release Update (SRU) infos:
-Impact: Text editing for RTL languages becomes difficult, see bug description below
-Addressed by: This bug has been addressed by adding an upstream patch included in KDE 4.2 that fixes this.
-Testcase: Install kate. Start kate. Copy the php code from the bug description and paste it in to kate
-Patch/regression potential: Small. The changes were part of the recent KDE 4.2 release and we have had no complaints yet.
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This is a request for a backport from trunk to 4.1.3 in ubuntu. The original bug is https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178594
"Back in March someone (who shall remain un-named) added to kate a new function which would calculate the "best direction" of a paragraph by counting the LTR and RTL chars in that line. That is r788729: http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kate/render/katerenderer.cpp?r1=772931&r2=788729 The last month I found a really ugly "bug" in it.
Imagine this php code:
function foo() {
$a = "שלום עולם";
return $a;
}
Now paste it into kate and see what happens. This get funkier when the hebrew is inside lists or hashes. IMHO, this renders this "feature" useless - much more people will be using kate to code then to write "plain text". My proposal is detecting the paragraph direction using QString::isRightToLeft() and in 4.3 also provide a manual method for setting the direction of the paragraph. IMHO, this renders kate unusable for editing code."
A visual display of how code looks can be seen here:
http://elcuco.blogli.co.il/files/2009/01/kate-hebrew-code-broken.png
I am requesting a backport of changeset 905112 to the currently available packages in 8.10. See the patch here: http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=905112 (it will apply to the branch as well).
Why does the fix not get backported by KDE to the 4.1 branch and thus 4.1.4?