Welcome everybody! - What can we do for you?

[H W Tovetjärn]

I referenced the wrong mailing list by mistake - the correct one is
kde-distro-packagers at kde.org, thanks to Elvis Angelaccio for pointing
out my mistake.

On 04/03/16 10:08, Martin Graesslin wrote:
> For me as a dev I try to specify it through CMakeLists. Like having explicit 
> mandatory dependencies and good description of optional features. Can you 
> please explain where this falls short? Given your reply I have a feeling that 
> this isn't sufficient to notice what is really needed. (And that's also my 
> experience so far which results in make everything mandatory).

Do these mandatory and optional dependencies translate into the "decent
Plasma experience"? What parts of Plasma make up this experience to
begin with? Which ones do you want the users to use? Is the KDE PIM
suite a part of it? CMakeLists are something I can understand - either
something is or it isn't. What I have a difficulty understanding is the
vision or what you want to achieve because it's rather subjective. Could
we get a list of criteria that translates into this by parsing and
aggregating all the CMakeLists into a single document, and then go from
there to make it more "human"?

> Do you have ideas how we can improve the dependency specification through CMake 
> which would make your job easier?

No, I do not. I'm certain that you are far more knowledgeable than I am
in that aspect.

My impression is that the discussion in kde-community at kde.org came to a
conclusion (as is evident by the existence of the mailing list we're on
now), despite the fact that Thomas Pfeiffer replied to it as recently as
today. I hope you're alright with me quoting select parts from the
thread in kde-community at kde.org, because they stand out to me (sorry if
the formatting gets messed up).

Quoting Cornelius Schumacher
(https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2016q1/002236.html):
> So defining and discussing criteria which make up a good experience,
> listing and communicating requirements, talking to each other about
> what is missing, what needs to be fixed, and where it should be fixed
> without playing upstream-downstream-ping-pong, sharing and possibly
> aligning roadmaps, all these things and more could happen through the
> distribution outreach program. This would be really wonderful.

Quoting Thomas Pfeiffer
(https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2016q1/002223.html):
> 1. We define - as strictly as necessary - criteria which a
> distribution has to meet in order for our software to run optimally
> on them. These criteria could include things like
> ...
> - Which version of our dependencies they should ship with each version
> (not just the minimum dependency, but the version we've identified to
> work best)
> - With which options they should compile and package our software
> - Other measures to avoid common downstream problems we've identified

I left out the first point due to distribution policies and release
schedules to focus on what I think is related to the ongoing discussion
here.

Quoting Sebastian Kügler
(https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2016q1/002234.html):
> It would be good to have a list of things that should just work for
> users, and check for that. I think the checking itself needs to be
> done by a human, though, to judge if it's just a script passing, or
> if things actually work the way they should.
>
> This check-list would of course be used by distros in the first place
> to make sure that a set of basic functionality passes.

Quoting Martin Gräßlin
(https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2016q1/002235.html):
> The important part here might be that we as a community sit down and
> define what we expect from a system.
>
> That can be things like:
>
> * connecting a bluetooth head set works out of the box
> * I don't need root privs to setup a printer
> * updates are shown in an easy way
> * no colorful items are added to the systray in a default install
> * sni-qt is shipped and setup correctly by default (that is skype
> works)
> * look and feel is either breeze or verified by experienced
> devs/designers to be complete
>
> That alone is something which will be very valuable and thus I think
> that's overall a very good idea presented by Thomas.

I believe all of you whom I quoted are contributors to KDE and there is
clearly something here that isn't in any CMakeLists I know of. While
some of the points raised are highly subjective I suspect an underlying
vision of what this "decent Plasma experience" would be like. While
writing tests might be premature, I think that you may be able to do
some brainstorming in a wiki article or on notes.kde.org. If you jot
down all these things that you consider important, we could go from
there to compile it into a more formal document.

-- 
Best regards,
H W "totte" Tovetjärn
totte at chakraos.org
chakraos.org

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