[rant] Target audience for calligra-suite.org

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Monday 14 November 2011 Nov, Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
> Hi,
> Congratulations and thanks for organizers of the Sprint and thanks to
> attendees - _you_ are Calligra!
> Because Calligra project is so ambitious plans we covered only some of
> topics and would need extra week or more.
> 
> One thing not covered is web site. It is sad to admit but
> calligra-suite.org quickly become "calligra-devel.org" in my eyes.
> 
> News like [1] with embedded shell commands easily contradict the idea
> of end-user-oriented product.

No. Those "embedded shell commands" tell actual users how to install Calligra. This update is actually one of the most end-user focussed news items on calligra-suite.org. 

Giving those commands is the only way users, any users, actual users, can install Calligra. It's up to the distributions to make the process easier, like OpenSUSE could do, but hasn't yet, with a one-click yast-based installation link. Such a thing doesn't exist on Ubuntu. 

> This doesn't mean I am against power-user and developer news on the
> web site but it definitely fits best to community.kde.org or Developer
> or Contribute section of calligra-suite.org.
> 
> This note of criticism is needed as much as previous criticism of
> kde.org raised by Dion Moult, getkde.org / kde-www-war author: Users
> run away from our web site screaming.
> 
> More than once, the answer I am getting from the community is that
> _currently_ Calligra is more about engine and not applications. It
> makes sense and I do contribute to that vision (with real code too)
> but then why not to make Calligra Engine(s) first-class message
> replacing calligra-is-suite-of-apps message?
> 
> Doing it too simply would however in some way hurt apps such as Krita
> or Kexi, apps that do intend to be more apps than shells around
> various engines.

Krita does not depend on calligra-suite.org to reach its users. Whether calligra-suite.org focusses on the engine potential, the desktop applications or something else isn't relevant for Krita.

> But these two apps already have user-oriented web
> sites (and I think this it not coincidence - they have users). So
> there is no threat to them but the dream is to have suite with
> somewhat common vision.
> 
> A constructive note: we may need proper sections on the web page
> leading to clear separation of content, per audience. Actually
> everything is mixed up as on a personal blog. This situation is
> clearly very similar to what we had before renaming KOffice.
> 
> Another note: the web usability is suboptimal - current top news
> refers to so important milestone beta 3 but at
> http://www.calligra-suite.org/ there is no mention it was released
> (and what is the most recent test version) because the news is hidden
> in archives. Instead, news from april is on the top. It is not up to
> Cyrille, maintainer, to take care of this. His time is too valuable.
> There is clearly something wrong with the web site, so wrong that even
> set of static html generated by a script (think excellent
> http://webodf.org) would save me writing this post.
> 


In the end, we do not have a product. The Calligra project does not produce anything that people can download, we are dependent on distributions to do that. 

> [1] http://www.calligra-suite.org/news/announcements/beta-3-packaging-updates/
> 
> 


-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl