[kde-community] Official KDE mirror on github

[Michael Pyne]

On Fri, September 18, 2015 23:28:37 Vishesh Handa wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 10:14 PM, Martin Graesslin <mgraesslin at kde.org> 
wrote:
> > So I join Sune, Eike and Marco: "Free software needs free tools, no
> > proprietary pull requests for KDE development!"
> 
> -1
> 
> I would prefer us to be more pragmatic. If an adequate free-software
> tool exists, lets try to use it. If a proprietary tool provides a
> better experience lets use that.

The end result of that type of thought is something like what happened with 
BitKeeper.

I'm not going to say it's impossible to use proprietary tools without having 
that type of drama occur, but I think it would be better if we just skipped to 
the part where we end up preferring a Free/open alternative to handle our 
critical tasks (as also happened with BitKeeper -> git).

Besides which, it actually is *already* a general principle of KDE projects. 
There was no point going through all the work and community debate about what 
it should mean to be a "KDE project" if we were just going to walk away from 
those points when something more attractive came along.

It should not be surprising that KDE developers advocate for something more 
than sheer pragmatism; if we were *only* pragmatic we could just recommend 
that people use Windows or Mac, no?

There is at least value in consistency. It would confuse our users if they 
could report bugs one way with KFoo (utilizing support from Github) but 
couldn't report bugs the same way with KBar. It would impact our developers: 
remember that part of the ethos of being a "KDE project" is that the code is 
notionally open to *all* KDE developers. Are we supposed to canvass for bugs 
on both b.k.o and Github for some (but not all) "official" KDE repositories in 
the future? I agree it could be more convenient for an individual KDE app 
developer to allow this feature, but they are not the only stakeholder when 
discussing applications that form part of a "kde.org" release.

Just my two cents...

Regards,
 - Michael Pyne