All About the Apps Goal

[Nate Graham]

Hello Jonathan,

I don't think people disagree with the broad outlines of the goal, but 
it's not obvious to me how the merge request in question supports it. 
Despite tons of discussion in the MR comments, It's hard for me to 
understand what the MR does. There is very little explanation of the 
"what" and the "why". I think maybe that's what's missing, maybe?

If it's to enable Snap support in KDE Gear packaging automatically, it 
would be good to put that in the MR description. And if people's 
objection to this is unclear maintainership for caretaking the Snap 
configuration, maybe you can volunteer in your role as goal leader to 
maintain the Snap configuration stuff? My impression is that you already 
do this anyway for Neon, so volunteering to do that would mostly be a 
matter of reassuring people that you'll keep doing what you already do :)

Nate


On 4/23/21 3:58 AM, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> 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 
> <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
>