[kde-community] Why were there no talks about Ubuntu Mobile at Akademy?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday, August 23, 2013 09:31:14 you wrote:
> On Friday 23 August 2013 01:10:09 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > a) Probably most libraries used do more than Ubuntu needs. Is every glibc
> > call used by Ubuntu software written by Canonical? Is every Qt API used?
> > (QWidget, e.g.)
> 
> No. But the difference here is that those examples are quite stable or have
> a huge community by themselves while KF5 is still in early stages and
> before Blue Systems announcing its support for it, it was mostly 3 (or so)
> guys doing KF5 in their spare time. That does make a difference in terms of
> needed efforts to incorporate something.

KF5 is not a new product. It is the modularization and porting to Qt5 of 
kdelibs/kderuntime. That makes a difference in terms of manpower needed to 
produce something of quality.

A number of people have been focused on triaging technology from kdelibs into 
upstream Qt5 as well, so not all work has been done only in the frameworks 
branch of kdelibs.

Blue System’s commitment is a big help, but it was not quite as dire as “3 or 
so guys doing it in their spare time”. Oh, and one of the people I pay has 
been spending part of their work hours on frameworks related tasks over the 
last several months .. 

.. and if companies like Canonical get involved, that will only go faster.

> > > needed. It is not possible for me or Albert to go to some API guys and
> > > tell
> > > them: You have to share code with KDE. This needs to happen from inside
> > > the
> > > team. The person doing the work must drive it.
> > 
> > There must be leadership that can set engineering mandates?
> 
> There is... But exactly those are the ones that need to worry about
> deadlines and additional risks. So unless the developer says "Yes, I can do
> this" on its own, they won't force anyone to go through the additional
> efforts I mentioned before.

Noted; so whomever reaches out to Canonical on this will probably need to help 
work on a roadmap strategy that takes deadline coordination into 
consideration.

> > Not many, I’m sure, but they exist. We have the Kubuntu folks and then
> > there are crazy people like me who do look at what ends up in Canonical’s
> > public repos and who have even done things like port apps written for
> > Ubuntu Touch to other QML component sets. So the ignorance can be
> > dissipated through effort!
> 
> Exactly, we're ending up again at *additional* effort. Which is really
> something that does not go well with tight deadlines.

This is an unfortunate way to do the bookkeeping. By cheating on work that 
really ought to be done now so today’s deadlines  can be met, tomorrow’s 
deadlines become that much harder. It really pays to step back and invest a 
little to ease future deadline pressure.

I wish Nokia had figured that one out a few years back ...

> That said. I try to make a good example by doing the Marble port for Ubuntu
> Touch in marble's git repo, by writing my phone apps in a way they can be
> used as a Plasmoid and a phone app and promoting this way of working on the
> ubuntu- phone mailing list.

Thanks for these efforts :)

> Still, I can't force other people to do the
> same and I am not Canonical management. Also keep that in mind when reading
> my mails. It's my personal views on things trying to explain the situation
> as it currently is.

Understood; and it’s a very valuable insight! Thanks...

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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