[kde-community] Differences between proposed vision drafts (or "inclusive" vs "focused")

[Boudhayan Gupta]

Hi,

At this point, I need to butt in.

On 4 February 2016 at 20:23, Alexander Dymo <alex at alexdymo.com> wrote:
> Let's consider another example. This time it will be the imaginary
> free Github replacement. This time the tech is too far away from
> user-end apps and shells. Let's say it wants to join KDE. Under the
> "inclusive" proposal such a project will be welcomed. Under "focused"
> - no.

There does exist a similar project, not yet widely publicised, yet is
being developed as a KDE Project.

It's called Propagator, and it manages a fleet of Git mirrors. We
developed it ourselves because we needed to make our Anongit
infrastructure more reliable, log sync failures, retry syncs on fail
after with ever increasing backoffs, and also sync to GitHub (we do
have a mirror there).

It's here: https://phabricator.kde.org/diffusion/PROPAGATOR/. At this
point only a few people know of this (mostly in the Sysadmin team) and
I was going to give it a proper unveiling at conf.kde.in next month,
but now the cat is out of the bag.

The point is, Propagator is server software. It uses no KDE libs, is
written in Python, and was developed to serve the sysadmin team's
specific needs. Along the way, we realised that this could be made
general-purpose enough to the extent we can offer it as a standalone
product, being managed as part of the KDE Project.

Under the "focused" proposal, such a software would have no place in
the KDE Project. In fact, a software, developed within KDE to address
KDE's (not KDE users but the KDE Project itself) needs cannot be a
part of the KDE Project. Do we want this situation to arise?

Propagator won't be the last piece of custom server software KDE will
need. Being involved with the sysadmins to some degree, I've
identified a few more areas where we'll need custom code that's
extensive enough to be published as products in their own right. If
we're only going to be "focused" on end-user software, we shoot
ourselves in our foot by denying a home to software we've developed to
solve our own problems, where the solutions are generic enough to be
used by others.

-- Boudhayan Gupta