Krita Sprint 2014, Saturday Meeting

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

Dear Boud,
Thanks for so many useful details.

It's easy to note that Krita and Kexi are more active parts of
Calligra these months. I think nobody really fees well with this.

My 2c regarding some topics. Every week counts so please let me to
post it below, before the Sprint planned for July, so I can understand
other opinions:

I wouldn't like to see any app and feature put in a drawer, so how
about a call for volunteers as early as possible?
As a backup plan perhaps some "who uses, maintains" rule can be
applied by releasing early, simple version of Qt-only Calligra Engine
so new people can try it, maybe use it, join us, maintain it and
develop. So the target users would be software engineers. We're
stronger in this area or to put it differently: our competition
(especially FOSS one) is weaker there. That gives natural opportunity.

Regarding Calligra 3.0 marketing. It's very important to me and we
won't have another try. I'd like to propose using a popular Web 2.0
meaning of Beta for a longer time, asking distros to package our
releases earely and often. Display a beta sign on all prominent
places: 3.0 Beta, then _no_ 3.0 stable but 3.1 Beta if needed, ...
then when we're ready, 3.x stable.
Alternative that I don't like would be a series of 3.0 Beta 1, 3.0
Beta 2,  .... - a bit complex for users and suggests stagnation. I
learned that in the time of 5 Betas of Kexi 0.1
(http://www.kexi-project.org/wiki/wikiview/index.php@ReleaseSchedule0.x.html)
10 years ago.
I know the new approach is nonstandard but indicates the special
stage. After we would be back to the usual rules.

>From Kexi side, there are the following stages during the transition:
- finalization of porting from Qt3Support to Qt 4 - ongoing last
larger part is being ported - 5 calendar weeks for me
- porting Predicate lib (aka KexiDB 2) from Qt4 to Qt5 - 3 calendar weeks for me
- then, these steps are needed in parallel:
-- porting Kexi (and a bit of Plan, Words?) from KexiDB to Predicate
-- 2 months for me (?)
-- porting Kexi to Qt5 to make it mostly work -- 2 months for me (?)
- then this is Kexi 3.0 Beta, and we can start taking benefits from
access to KF5 (less deps so attractive for 3rdparty computing
environments) and new candies of Qt5 (solid scripting,
distro/architecture-independent extensions, forming  community around
such things)

Regarding possibility of Krita forking some shared UI infra, I would
welcome Krita continuing of taking usability and convenience/appeal
for the user as a starting point. Sharing UIs between business/office
and creative apps shouldn't have higher priority IMHO. And this is not
a not-invented-here syndrome in Krita (or Kexi where there were
similar challenges due to specialization of the app). There's still so
much to be shared, our integration and frameworks won't go  away.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 Kexi & Calligra & KDE | http://calligra.org/kexi | http://kde.org
 Qt for Tizen | http://qt-project.org/wiki/Tizen
 Qt Certified Specialist | http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek