Maintainership of KMail

[Don Sanders]

On Tuesday 03 December 2002 02:32, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> On Sunday 01 December 2002 08:48, Don Sanders wrote:
> > I am willing to give this proposal a try.
> >
> > I accept Ingo's offer.
> >
> > Ingo can you please update the about box. I would prefer the term
> > Adopter if possible. Whether people remember it or not there was
> > a
>
> What is a Adopter ?

In open source / free software an adopter is someone who adopts an 
orphaned package. (See also Homesteading the Nooshere)

For example when Matthias Elter orphaned some of his packages recently 
others stepped up and adopted them. In my case I adopted a package 
that was never announced on a mailing list as orphaned.

However orphaned KMail was and I worked on it virtually alone for many 
months under the difficult conditions of the KDE2 libs rewrite. I got 
pretty used to KMail segfaulting on startup after updating kdelibs. I 
also had people write me PM telling me my work was a waste of time, 
that KMail was dead, and that I should stop working on it.

At one point I even had to object to Dirk's suggestion to remove KMail 
from cvs.

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=93897904406075&w=2
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=93897904006067&w=2
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=93901495929392&w=2
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=93896821530907&w=2
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=93889883024596&w=2

(Please note that Rik never discouraged my efforts and always competed 
with me in friendly terms, we even worked together to found the 
kdepim package)

This was a dark time in KMail's history and it was not too far from 
being a Don vs World situation. I can't be certain that no one else 
would have picked KMail up if I left, but with KMail being unusable 
in cvs I sincerely doubt it (look at KRN for example).

Over a period of time (and dedication and effort) kdelibs stabalized, 
KMail improved, then others joined me and my maintainership of the 
package was recognized by my new peers, first partially by George 
Staikos and consequently by Daniel Naber.
http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdenetwork/kmail/main.cpp.diff?r1=1.97&r2=1.98
http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdenetwork/kmail/main.cpp.diff?r1=1.110&r2=1.111&only_with_tag=MAIN
http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdenetwork/kmail/main.cpp

> I don't think people will understand what you mean with this.
> At least I don't.

Hopefully I've made things clearer. For the record personally I'm not 
a fan of about boxes which is partially why I never touched one 
before the recent conflict began. I would prefer it if all about 
boxes were removed from KDE (and plain text AUTHORS files be used 
instead). Indeed if I was a distributor that's one of the first 
things I would do (along with removing the link to bugs.kde.org and 
handling bug reports myself).

But of course I realize almost everyone else here will disagree with 
this last point.

FYI I might not be able to continue this conversation as I have to 
leave soon.

Don Sanders / sanders at kde.org
KMail Cool  Co-founder / kmailcool.org
KMail  Adopter / kmail.kde.org
KDE PIM  Co-founder / kdepim.org
KAddressbook  Founder / kaddressbook.org
KDE  Contributor / kde.org