[kde-community] Proposal: KDE Manifesto wording revision

[Cornelius Schumacher]

On Monday 11 November 2013 13:56:32 Eike Hein wrote:
> 
> After the exchanges in this and the other leg of the subthread
> there ended up being a follow-up discussion on IRC, with Aaron,
> Sune (svuorela), me (Sho_) and others contributing.
> 
> Ultimately, we've together settled on this wording suggestion:
> 
> "All project assets must be hosted on infrastructure available
> and writable to all KDE contributor accounts."

Thanks for the nice progress and the good discussion.

> Summing up the thoughts behind this:
> 
> * This is intended to cover the ideas behind both the original
>   ALL and ONLY clauses by specifying that 'all project assets'
>   must be on infrastructure that's covered by our contributor
>   account system. The way this implements ONLY is by implicitly
>   ruling out mirrors that contain additional assets - in other
>   words, it's meant to ensure that KDE's repositories are ca-
>   nonical for projects, and not outdated. This brings parity
>   between what ReviewBoard is doing and what a GitHub mirror
>   is doing.

When I read the suggestion and this explanation I wonder why we don't just say 
what is meant: "The canonical version of the project is hosted on KDE 
infrastructure"?

This doesn't cover the part that all KDE contributors have write access to all 
projects, but that would be covered by the original proposal of  “All KDE 
contributor accounts are granted direct, universal write access to the 
software assets"

> * The new wording hopefully succeeds in being less off-putting
>   to readers, to avoid defeating the purpose of the original
>   ONLY cause (i.e. we want to successfully pitch/convince
>   people to be part of the community, not appear to force them).

I'll give you my feedback here, from when I read the proposed wording for the 
first time: I perceived it as off-putting, because it says "all" and it says 
"must". That feels as a pretty scary statement to me, especially looking from 
the perspective of someone trying to move closer to KDE, but not being there 
yet.

It also sounds like it would rule out using any other tools, which are not 
hosted on KDE infrastructure. In the IRC log there were mentioned Google Docs, 
Trello, there are certainly more (and not only closed-source ones). I don't 
think we are trying to say that, as that would obviously go against the status 
quo, and the manifest is supposed to document our current view, not a future 
goal.

Maybe that's not what's meant as you explain in the paragraph below, but it 
isn't obvious to me from just reading the suggested wording. Could be that 
it's just me, though ;-)
 
> * Hosting location is still not nailed down further than "KDE
>   contributor accounts must have r/w access", answering a de-
>   mand in the original Manifesto discussion.

I guess the reason why I'm perceiving this as excluding non-KDE hosted 
infrastructure is that I read "KDE contributor accounts must have r/w access" 
as "I must be able to log in with identity.kde.org". That's obviously not 
possible with many services hosted by other parties.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org>