[kde-community] About ocs-server future

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Friday, January 15, 2016 16:25:18 Claudio Desideri wrote:
> What's the future of OCS now? Did something came out at the meeting?

Yes, we touched base on a couple of topics, and catalogued problems we see, we 
also found a lot of yet unanswered questions. Let me try to give you a quick 
high-level overview.

>From a KDE point of view, there are a bunch of things we're unhappy with, 
they're separate issues, but relate and influence on each other.

KDE software relies on a proprietary server component, for example, one of 
Plasma's core features is extendability through themes, plasmoids, wallpapers, 
etc.. These things work nicely, but they have a lot of limitations, one being 
application installation, and that the whole story about app deployment isn't 
really nicely solved, gethotnewstuff and the package manager are entirely 
unaware of each other, for example, which leads to complex situations and a 
not very well integrated user experiences when it comes to installations of 
apps, or addons. What about other types of content? We've created a bit of a 
mess there, and we need to get the right people together to work on a 
solution.

While opendesktop.org was really ahead of its time initially, in the past 
year, we've lost some ground there. I think the only really acceptable way 
forward is to get development on both, the server and client sides moving into 
the same direction (which exactly is another unanswered question), and that 
this needs to happen in an open process. Relying on a component we can't 
really influence the development of hinders us solving important problems in 
our software deployment story, so we need to get this going again on both 
sides. I am convinced that the best way to do this is to strive for a Free and 
openly developed server component, and close collaboration between people 
working on the server and on the client. (Interestingly, opendesktop.org 
became really great when exactly that happened: development of server and 
client in tune.)

It won't happen by itself, and there's a lot of work ahead, but improvements 
in this space bring us a lot of potential for substantial improvements for our 
users.

I hope this gives you a better idea of what has been discussed since we last 
talked.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

Sebastian Kügler    |    http://vizZzion.org    |     http://kde.org