Office/ and Utilities/ menu reorganization

[Christoph Cullmann]

On Friday 12 August 2005 11:27, Stephan Binner wrote:
> OK, let me elaborate on it. I feel there is a widespread "no efforts"
> attitude among maintainers of applications which are in the KDE
> modules/releases: they are glad that they don't have to package the
> applications but also don't care about increasing application versions or
> listing bugfixes/new features for releases or updating webpages or entries
> on application index sites.
That's really one-eyed to call this "no effort". I must confess, I update the 
kde-apps.org entries for KWrite/Kate only on major releases most of the time, 
the Kate homepage lacks new content since years, beside some hl files and the 
only active place in the web is the Kate Wiki. I missed to increase the Kate 
release numbers for bugfix releases, too. But really, I have only my spare 
time for this, and if I get some hours of time, I normally start to look up 
the bugs, implement some stuff wanted by users or me and code. Yes, as 
maintainer I should perhaps do more "admin" stuff than code, but as 
Kate/KWrite (like many other apps, unlike hot-spots like KMail/...) have not 
more devs than 1-3 which do regular work and another 1-3 who show up 
sometimes I don't really see where the time should come from to keep an eye
on all this. What's convenient, and that is true, is that I have not to spend 
my time to package the stuff, announce the releases, freezes and coordinate 
that all.

>
> I think this hurts KDE overall. I don't know any other Open Source project
> (including GNOME) were the packaging part of a release process is done by
> the release dude (and the other above points are accepted to be neglected).
>
> If an maintainer doesn't increase version numbers, adds a changelog for
> making new tarball then there will be simply no new release (with new
> features) in other projects. And it's also a good way to detect which
> maintainers are still active. Those who are not making releases/tarballs
> will also likely don't care about bug reports or watch the commits to their
> applications.
I really don't think so, why does users get hurt if some changelog entries are 
missing? Yes, they should be added, me never done this I guess beside adding
stuff to the feature plans, but what is more important, that the app/libs you 
have to maintain get fixes or that the app gets less fixes but they got all 
announced?

>
> Maybe I'm wrong with the "no efforts" attitude and all those maintainers
> are actually dead - then we have an even bigger quality problem long term.
I guess for many small util apps the "dead" might even be correct.