[kde-community] Proposal One: KDE (Core) Apps and Suites

[Mario Fux]

Good morning dear ladies and gentlemen

This is finally an attempt of a summary of this thread. Please see as well the 
thread "KDE applications 4.14 LTS or 4.15?" on kde-devel and its summary.

But first some critic to myself. The proposal was too broad and not specific 
enough.

First a summary of the sub-threads:

- Luigi: There was a plan to split KDEToys
-- Albert: shouldn't be a problem

- Aleix: Pro and contra for KDE Core Apps concept. relation between them and 
Plasma, Vision needed? KDE Edu wants to know about KF5 based releases.

- Albert: There are no real modules, team maintainance difficult (needs 
specific knowledge), proposal doesn't make much sense
-- Aleix: Plasma needs apps to work great, lack of a definition of this set 
atm
--- Vishesh: not "core", healthy competition (who is in "core"?), closer to 
Plasma
---- Albert: no "Plasma Okular", important message: Okular works elsewhere too
----- Inge: +1, Difficulty between great integration with Plasma and apps 
works on other "Desktops"/Systems as well: Apps should make clear in name what 
they do: e.g. "Okular Document Viewer"
------ Agustín: taking a big risk on diluting the brand "KDE" 
--- Aleix: Does Dolphin depend on Plasma? vision-wise not technically
---- Inge: "Plasma is not dependent on Dolphin. But the user experience given 
by Plasma is dependent on having an application like Dolphin. The Plasma 
desktop needs to have something like Dolphin to be a complete desktop"

- Jaroslaw: Kate is not a "core" app; take basic user or persona perspectives
-- Jos: not "Core Apps" => "KDE Essentials"?, +1 to Agustin, "KDE 
Applications" should have a wider scope (incl. Calligra, Amarok and Co), more 
freedom if apps want to be in a release or not, different version #, something 
like a "KDE Applications SC" for distros, +1 for accessibility
-- "KDE Essentials. Very bare: Konsole, Kwrite, Dolphin, Ark, Okular, 
Gwenview, you can imagine. The criteria: EVERY user (well, ~90%), swapable 
with others" No duplicates. Release team decides based on discussions.
--- Martin: Unified versions, written goals for "KDE Essentials", otherwise +1
---- Jos: independent apps for different platforms => no unified versions
----- Martin: Why should an app join a release? Define target users, personas
------ Jos: "we would greatly benefit from a anonymous  usage tracking"
------ Albert: Reasons to join a release (Christoph and Jos: +1)

--- Jaroslaw: "We're not controlling the deployment process" & "many apps 
belong to many groups of tasks" & experience of Calligra
---- Albert & Co: Splitting or Unification/Suitification?
----- Jos: compromise of: => "get everything a bit more in line"
* little work for everybody
* is flexible for app developers
* gets software asap to our users
* works for the distro's
* is simple to understand
------ Myriam: Problem of releases with too much text (visibility of project)
------- Martin: +1
-------- Marco: Rolling releases of KDE apps

My conclusions:
- No matter what: "Core Apps" is not the name of choice! ;-) "KDE Essentials" 
is an alternative or "Basic Apps"
- Plasma and the apps it needs to be a complete experience and work 
environment. E.g. Dolphin as the file manager (or other file managers?) => 
needs a discussion in Plasma?
- Discuss about target users and what apps they need/tasks they want to 
fulfill => Something for the usability people?
- Joined "KDE Application" releases make sense for a lot of people (see 
Albert's email for the good reasons) but they can offer more freedom to be 
part of such a release or not => see 4.14 thread above
- We don't really know our user, how many they are and what they use => we 
need anonymous  usage tracking (opt-in or opt-out) for our KF5 based software!
- About the topic of building groups or suites. Many apps fit in many groups.

And yes it became a rather big email (but it took me some hours to write it as 
well ;-).

Best regards
Mario