Kubuntu and other KDE distribution's use of KDE infrastructure

[Adriaan de Groot]

[Quoting two messages (from Luca Beltrame and Ovidiu-Florin BOGDAN), with 
slightly re-arranged text.]

To recap, this thread started with a general question by Valorie about 
distro's (or distro/packaging teams) using KDE infrastructure. It has become 
more specific: the Kubuntu packaging team (if that's the right word for it) 
would like some things arranged in KDE Phab for that team. Technically, this 
is a tiny request (and Albert says "let's get on with it"), but there's an 
ongoing non-technical discussion.

We don't really have a definition of the groups (of people) we're talking 
about; just some examples of self-identified groups of packagers / distro 
people. One example is the Kubuntu peeps; another is the KDE-FreeBSD peeps 
(which is 8 guys, all told, I think).

On Thursday 12 January 2017 17:18:46 Luca Beltrame wrote:
> Il giorno Thu, 12 Jan 2017 15:27:21 +0100
> 
> Adriaan de Groot <groot at kde.org> ha scritto:
> > Luca, what exactly are you "Nay"-ing? The former or the latter? If
> > the latter, do you also object to
> > https://phabricator.kde.org/project/view/199/ ?
> 
> The latter. For KDE-FreeBSD, I'd argue it's special-cased as AFAICS (but
> you're the expert here, feel free to point out if I'm wrong) it
> originated within KDE and not from outside.

[I couldn't correct you: back then I was doing KDE-on-Solaris, and I wandered 
over to FreeBSD after I was done with the 64-bit port of KDE; at that point 
KDE-FreeBSD way already a lively group led by Lauri Watts, who was IIRC also 
KDE's translation coordinator.]

I'm having a terrible time understanding the nature of the line in the sand 
you'd like to draw. What does the Venn diagram look like to you? Frankly I'd 
rather not have FreeBSD be "the special case" if it comes to that.

Where does KDE Neon fit in your worldview? That's *definitely* a distro, and a 
KDE project to boot, and it uses KDE infrastructure. Then there's KDE Argon, 
Xenon and others .. different base distro's, same purpose, to deliver the 
latest KDE software with your favorite underlying platform.

If your stance is "KDE delivers source and nothing else" -- which is true to 
some extent, except for our more recent AppImage / FlatPak efforts -- then I 
still don't see how that translates to "KDE doesn't help downstream in any 
way", which is kind of how I interpret your objection to a technically trivial 
service to a self-identified community.

Earlier you (Luca) said that distro teams should use the downstream tools. 
That presumes that downstream *has* those tools, and somehow singles out 
"distros" as a special class of (sub-)communities that ought to have 
downstream tools. What makes them special compared to, say, a community 
interested in delivering KDE software on Android (not a distro) or on touch 
devices, or in Kiosk mode, or indeed KDE people interested in KDE software for 
diving and 3D-printing (surely they should have underwater^Wdownstream tools 
as well and otherwise they can print them).

I imagine that where there's overlap -- namely between KDE and <foo> -- that 
there's some presence on *both* sides of that overlap. Namely some KDE-<foo> 
resources on the KDE side, and some <foo>-KDE resources on the other.

Compare
	https://freebsd.kde.org/  (KDE side)
	https://wiki.freebsd.org/KDE  (FreeBSD side)

It is pretty much the same people on both ends, with different emphasis -- but 
that's precisely because this is a case of overlap.


On Friday 13 January 2017 18:35:02 Ovidiu-Florin BOGDAN wrote:
> 2017-01-13 9:40 GMT+02:00 Luca Beltrame <lbeltrame at kde.org>:
> > Il giorno Thu, 12 Jan 2017 23:09:16 +0100
> > 
> > Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> ha scritto:
> > > This takes 1 minute to create and adds 0.0003% of work to our
> > > servers, let's just add it and stop a conversation that is making us
> > > spend lots of human- hours discussing it.
> > 
> > I thought there were no problems from a technical perspective. The
> > discussion is all about the non technical aspects as far as I see it.
>
> Should we gather +s and -s and count them as a vote? Can we give the
> sysadmins the ok?

I don't think votes are the way to go, really. I'd much rather just get on 
with it. For the FreeBSD project on KDE's phab, I didn't even think about it: 
I'm a KDE person, I'm interested in delivering KDE software to a particular 
group, and I do lots of things on KDE infrastructure for doing that delivery 
(e.g. filing bugs, writing patches, blogging, running KDE CI for FreeBSD), and 
sysadmin suggested having a Phab project for it would be useful to group 
things. Yeah, sure.

I don't see, given the *tiny* technical burden implied by the request in this 
thread, why Kubuntu should be any different from FreeBSD.

On the other hand, we do need to watch out a little for scope creep. As long 
as the request is tiny, and the resource use is sensible, things are fine. 
Somewhere there's a blurry line, though, where downstreams / subgroups need to 
put in own effort / resources to support KDE like KDE supports them.

It's a quid-pro-quo and a cooperation, in other words.

[ade]