All About the Apps Goal

[Jonathan Riddell]

KDE's All About the Apps Goal hopes to use modern methods of getting our
apps to users.  I seem not to have been clear about what I mean by that so
time to check in and ask again.  These days apps (and websites and any
software) gets developed by developers who are empowered to deploy them all
the way to the user through suitable QA.  In the apps of KDE apps that
means using app stores (flathub, snap store, appimagehub, microsoft store,
fdroid, google play etc) and integrating the packaging for those stores
into the apps repos themselves and our release tools.

This is a massive change of culture compared to what KDE has largely done
until now where the packaging and deployment have been separated into often
entirely separated organisations.  That does not seem to have served us
well, our software has not taken over the world except by other
orgaisations who have followed these practices, such as KHTML's derivative
now being used by Microsoft Edge. It's not a setup done anywhere outside
the Linux distros and KDE has long aspired to move beyond just Linux
distros.

Our most successful apps have long gone ahead and done this, Krita is now
available on the Epic Games store.  It seems strange to me not to want to
emulate that success.  Moving packaging into app repos makes it smoother

Recently I made a minimum viable patch for the KDE Gear release tooling to
bump up the version numbers where those apps have snapcraft packaging
files.  However I've been told I shouldn't "overstate the nature of the
goal" with an objection to integrating the packaging into the app
repositories.

https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/release-tools/-/merge_requests/15#note_205935

I've little interest in putting lots of apps into app stores without this
change of culture where app developers take some responsibility for the end
result.  It would likely end up with unmaintained apps.

So would KDE developers prefer the status quo where our packaging is
deliberately separated from our app development?  Or can we start with
moving, where appropriate for the teams doing the work, to move packaging
into the app repos and link the apps with the users?

Jonathan
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