State of Proposal to improving KDE Software Repository Organization?

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Mon, 18 Jan 2016, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:

> Reason that I ask is that due to the split of Calligra into several repos (see 
> background^) the layout in the repo structure does no longer properly reflect 
> the project organisation. Right now there are three active repos in the 
> calligra/ repo substructure:
> "calligra" at "calligra/"
> "krita"    at "calligra/krita"
> "kexi"     at "calligra/kexi"

What I'm wondering is, where is this "structure" actually visible? Not in

https://quickgit.kde.org/

or

https://phabricator.kde.org/diffusion/

I see it reflected in the old, to be discarded

https://projects.kde.org/projects

But where else? And what is it actually needed for?

>
> (("calligra" at "calligra/" confuses at least kdesrc-build, sent an email to 
> mpyne about if moving it to "calligra/calligra" should fix it.))
>
> Things that are not properly matching organization:
> * Krita starting with 3.* no longer is part of Calligra project
>  (screws e.g. api.kde.org/bundled-apps-api/calligra-apidocs/ and also
>  what people think to which project Krita belongs)
> * Calligra & Krita are nowhere different to KDevelop, Digikam & Co,
>  so no reason to be in a complete own toplevel structure,
>  rather should be in the same sub structure, i.e. "Extragear",
>  like extragear/calligra/* and extragear/graphics/krita
>
> More, not only Calligra & Krita related:
> * "Extragear" is an awful grouping name for apps with individual
>  release plans, a legacy term that no longer fits most of the apps
>  in that substructure

It's ghastly -- almost insulting. It's perpetuating the fallacy that
there are core KDE projects and peripheral projects.

> * "KDE Applications" is a misleading grouping name for apps with a
>  central release plan, as if those with individual release plans
>  are not "KDE" applications (as in, not done in the KDE community)

Horrible as well.

> * a single category per app as needed by the current tree structure layout
>  of the repos, like "office", "graphics", "utils", is rather awkward,
>  many apps do not match exactly one or would match multiple categories

Honestly, the need to group repositories is, to me, so weird that I think 
it would be best to adopt the following scheme:

a/amarok
a/...
...
c/calligra
g/gcompris
k/krita

And so on. It's meaningless as it is; it would be better to make that clear,
if grouping is really needed.

> So IMHO some update of the repository organisation would be good, to reflect 
> how things are these days.
> Renaming of "Extragear" and "KDE Applications" is surely something which needs 
> care from promo/marketing/VDG people first to find if that makes sense at all 
> and what a good solution would be.

That again begs the question: where is the "organization" which apparently has
purely technical reasons visible to contributors and users?

> (Being both maintainer of Okteta, which is in "KDE Applications", and meta-co-
> maintainer of Calligra, which is not, but still done in the very same KDE 
> community, that current naming seems so wrong to me).
>
> But the actual names and grouping aside, for the pure technical renewing 
> (which also involves all infrastructure like translation system, 
> documentation, phabricator, etc), who is currently planning or working on 
> what?
> So does it makes sense to wait some more, or should we assume the current 
> organization stays for longer, and Calligra & Krita repos should be moved 
> inside that organization for now?
>
>
> ^Some background about Calligra repo split, as things are slightly 
> complicated:
>
> KRITA)  The "krita" repo was split off, because Krita has finally become a 
> full project of its own, separate from Calligra. A logical place for the krita 
> repo in the KDE repo structure would perhaps have been somewhere in extragear, 
> but at least due to the translators preferring to keep the string catalogs of 
> Krita in the "calligra" module as before, for less work, the krita repo was 
> for now put as submodule of "calligra/".
>
> KEXI)  Kexi continues to be part of the Calligra project/subcommunity, but the 
> Kexi developers preferred a small simple repo "kexi" of their own (for build 
> time and size). So the placement at "calligra/kexi" makes perfect sense.
>
> OTHERAPPS)  As the other Calligra apps (Braindump, Karbon, Sheets, Words, 
> Stage, etc.) are more tightly coupled and the binary interfaces between libs, 
> plugins & apps can still change every other week, for now no further repo 
> splitting is planned (to ensure atomic commits on API changes), and they all 
> stay in the existing "calligra" repo.
>
>
> Cheers
> Friedrich
> _______________________________________________
> Krita mailing list
> kimageshop at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kimageshop

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