Plans for the future and coordination

[Matthieu Gallien]

Hello,

Sorry for the late answer, your mail got hidden by other emails.

On vendredi 5 janvier 2018 19:17:16 CET Alexander Stippich wrote:
> Hello,
> 

[...]

> > 
> > 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 spent some time reading again the forum thread where Andrew Lake and other 
people from VDG had discussions about the mockups. I agree with the point that 
good mockups are nothing if you do not have a long term vision for your 
product. I would like to build one.

Given your goals and mine, we could say something like that:

Elisa is a music player by the KDE community that strive to be simple and nice 
to use. We also recognized that we need a flexible product to accustom for the 
different workflows of our users.
We focus on a very good integration with the Plasma desktop from KDE without 
compromising the support for other platforms (other Linux desktop 
environments, Windows and Android).
We would like to build a reliable and enjoyable to use product.
We aim for a music player for your local music first and will later add 
support for online services.

What do you think ?

I acknowledge our need to focus on small good steps toward a more complete 
product instead of spending our energy on a lot of things but without having 
solid features.

Given the feedback in the lwn.net thread, I am convinced we need to have a 
concept of "saved searches" or something like that. They may be added to the 
left list and would enable users to build their own way to browse their music. 
This is currently not my priority.

We need to pay attention that a lot of people have moved to online only music. 
I would like not to ignore this.

> > 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.

Thanks, this is very useful.

> > 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.

I have read the one from Plasma and somewhat feel that it may partly apply to 
us. I am still convinced that one for us would enable to easily answer the 
need to better explain our work to the KDE community and to a larger audience.

> 
> Btw, thanks for the credits :)

You are doing a very good job and you already added a lot of nice things in 
this project. You deserve it.

> 
> > Best regards
> > 
> > --
> > Matthieu Gallien
> 
> Best regards,
> Alex
> 
> 
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