Plans for the future and coordination

[Alexander Stippich]

Hello,

On Freitag, 29. Dezember 2017 15:05:03 CET Matthieu Gallien wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> To continue to push forward the development of elisa and better communicate
> our plans, I would like to improve a bit the way we are working.
> 
> I get the feel that (at least for me) I have lost focus of what is really
> important.
> 

Currently I'm almost solely addressing things that personally bug me. 
Actually, fixing the dark theme is the first that didn't directly affect me. So 
I am not following any real plan here and having some sort is a good idea.

> The following goals are the ones I would like most to be achieved. I would
> like to also collect goals of other people involved with elisa.
> 
> My goals are those:
> * Ensure elisa works really good with Baloo ;
> * Ensure elisa reasonably works on Linux desktops, Windows and Android ;
> * Ensure elisa support for UPnP/DLNA is a first class citizen.
> 

My personal use case right now is linux desktop only, so the first two points 
are also important for me. I actually have a client/server setup, but never 
really used UPnP. My personal opinion is to focus on Linux desktop first and to 
achieve somewhat feature parity with the VDG mockups, since KDE imho lacks a 
nice and simple music player there, and then expand to others. But I know that 
you have other interests, which I'm fine with of course.

> I also have some orthogonal important value:
> * being inclusive (welcome new developers, try to support as much as
> possible the diversity of possible users) ;
> * being as much as possible bug free ;
> * being geared toward satisfying user goals ;
> * being perfectly usable without network access and leverage network
> services when possible.
> 

I agree on all points. But with all those we have to be careful that we do not 
get distracted too early. I would rather make Elisa perfect with what it is 
currently capable of (e.g. bug free, perfect usability 
on the desktop etc.) before adding new big features or platforms.

Since I somewhat recently went through becoming a developer myself, I was 
about to enhance the documentation on the community web page a bit anyways and 
maybe also cleanup the repo, because some things confused me. That may help 
new developers a little.

> We have to ensure our goals align with the goals of the overall KDE
> community.
> 
> The next step will be to produce a kind of vision statement and derive a
> kind of plan to help guide the development.
> See for example plasma vision statement (https://vizzzion.org/blog/2017/07/
> plasmas-vision/).
> 

I'm wondering if we actually need our own vision statement or if it is 
sufficient to be in line with the KDE goals (in the longterm). But that is up to 
you.

Btw, thanks for the credits :)

> Best regards
> 
> --
> Matthieu Gallien

Best regards,
Alex