Applications Lifecycle Policy

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Wed, 5 Jul 2017, Martin Flöser wrote:

> I'm now going to propose a rather radical change to the process:
> 
> 1. Remove extragear
> 2. Remove playground
> 3. Remove the 2 week Review process
> 
> Let me explain the reasoning.
> 
> Extragear: to me extragear is a relict from the time of the big one KDE svn
> trunk repository. There was "KDE" and everything else, aka. extragear. When I
> started to compile KDE software it looked to me like something created from
> the needs of SVN. A technical thing. Now we have git and we have split up all
> those parts which used to be KDE, except for extragear. Where is the
> difference between Krita (to my knowledge not part of extragear), 

It isn't -- for some reasons I don't exactly understand, it's still part of
calligra in some kind of hierarchy, though not in the repo.

> Amarok (to
> my knowledge part of extragear) and Dolphin (to my knowledge part of KDE
> Applications)? Honestly I don't see it.
> 
> Let's just remove it and separate into applications released as part of a
> larger bundle for release simplification and applications having their own
> release cycle.

Yeah.

> 
> To me the review process always felt weird and also like a relict from other
> times. I contributed to overall KDE something like 100 k lines of new code -
> none of them went through review. Would KWin pass review today? Just for the
> fun I opened up Krazy and see 444 open issues. Objectively speaking KWin is
> known as one of the products with highest quality in the KDE area and one of
> the window managers with highest quality and the Wayland compositor with
> largest test coverage. On the other hand it would fail our rules for review
> (granted Krazy reports so many false positives in the case of KWin, that I
> didn't check for years).

Same here. Nearly 10k commits later, I'm not sure Krita would get through review,
let alone that that there would be someone capable of reviewing it...

> KWayland entered frameworks without review. How come? Well it moved from
> Plasma to frameworks, so no review needed. How did it enter Plasma? Well it
> was split out of KWin. Back then it was a few files providing a very minimal
> library for Wayland clients. If we had started in Playground we would have had
> to go through review - today it's a code base of 50 k (according to cloc).
> Similar if we would have started a new Wayland compositor from scratch it
> would have had to go through review, but by extending KWin that was never
> needed.

Good point.

<...>
 
> Similar we see now for Kube. If it would have started as a "KMail 3" no review
> would be needed, but as Kube it needs to go through review. That's arbitrary.
> If I would start a new project I would think that this process is a joke. The
> quality just doesn't get measured any more after review.

Excellent point.

<...>

> * is the project a one person show?

Poor Gimp... Poor mitchfoo.

> So instead of a one time review I would propose a continuous review of the
> projects and make it available in an easy accessible way so that users can
> also see the objective quality of the application. And yes that would mean
> that many long standing applications would have a way lower quality than the
> new kids on the block.
> 
> For KDE Applications, Plasma and Frameworks I expect to have additional rules
> for integration. Frameworks already has them, Plasma kind of has them, but I
> think they are not codified and KDE Applications could e.g. start with the
> current review process.
> 
> So to sum it up: I don't think there is a need for extragear and playground
> any more. When a project starts it should have the same rights and obligations
> as any other current extragear app. In addition we should come up with

While I don't have any stake in this discussion -- when I die, there'll be this 
on my headstone "Here lies Boud, he worked on Krita, boring guy, otherwise" --
I really agree with the way you're thinking.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.krita.org, http://www.valdyas.org