[kde-community] Closing the kde-core-devel mailing list

[Eike Hein]

On 26.08.2014 22:05, Milian Wolff wrote:
>> That would leave kde-devel for what it's been used for the past 15 years:
>> discussing development of applications that are tightly integrated with
>> KDE's desktop environment (i.e., Plasma desktop).
>
> I like that suggestion!

My 2 cents: "KDE" is a the name of a community that makes a
whole bunch of things, chiefly among them right now:

* A set of libraries/frameworks that complement Qt and help
   with building applications and workspaces that run nicely
   on a variety of systems (and within a variety of work-
   spaces, in case of the applications).

* A set of workspaces, taking advantage of the above.

* A set of applications that integrate well with the above
   thanks to the prowess of those frameworks, but also inte-
   grate well with other workspaces.

It follows from this that "kde-devel" (= KDE development)
is a bad name for "discussing development of applications
that are tightly integrated with Plasma", for two reasons:

* It's just one of the many development-type activities
   that projects within KDE do.

* Thanks to excellent layering, much of "tightly integra-
   ting with Plasma" doesn't happen on the application
   level.

As a broader theme, I'm annoyed whenever we start this kind
of jealous-guarding behavior vis-a-vis "apps must be tight-
ly integrated with Plasma". We don't need to behave this
way, it's not necessary, and sometimes it's holding us back.

Our goal should be to deliver value to users. There are
many ways KDE provides value to users today, and a lot of
those don't use Plasma. KDE provides value to users when
they use our applications in Gnome or on Windows. KDE pro-
vides value to users when they use an application that was
built with Qt, CMake or valgrind, because we've helped all
of these projects in one way or another. None of these are
related to using Plasma, but they're an important part of
what makes KDE relevant in the world today.

It's completely valid for an application project inside
the KDE community to care greatly for its audience out-
side the userbase of Plasma. We're still winning when
ever someone uses something we've touched and improved
in any way.

Moreoever, we've engineered our community in such a way
that such tight integration will regardless, both tech-
nologically and socially:

* On the tech side, we've layered things so that Plasma
   can be a driver of application integration by providing
   a Qt platform plugin.

* On the social side, we have tenets like shared owner-
   ship, shared responsibility and broad write access,
   which means it's easy for those concerned with inte-
   gration to expand its scope across all of our projects.

So yeah, let's please not make a "write apps for Plasma"
mailing list. It doesn't fit what KDE is today - and
that's a good thing, because our ambitions have become
grander and our means to accomplish them have, too.

NB: I mostly work on Plasma these days.


Cheers,
Eike