kdeinit (was: Summary from Buildsystem BoF at Desktop Summit)

[John Layt]

On Tuesday 16 Aug 2011 15:55:57 Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 03:40:22PM +0200, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> > A Dimarts, 16 d'agost de 2011, Oswald Buddenhagen vàreu escriure:
> > > On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 10:59:18AM +0200, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > > > In my opinion, kdeinit should stay.
> > > 
> > > try to convince lennart of that. when i suggested to add kdeinit-like
> > > functionality to systemd his response was "no way". and if we ignore
> > > systemd, we'll lose in the longer run.
> > 
> > So you are going to let a guy that has stated publicly that hates KDE
> 
> where has he done that? and i mean literally, not according to your
> interpretation.

I've certainly seen him state that he doesn't care about KDE, that we are 
irrelevent to anything he does, and he sees no reason to collaborate on 
anything with us.  It's similar to his attitude towards *BSD.  For someone 
working on key parts of the shared stack it is a disappointing attitude to 
have.

> > decide KDE's future?
> 
> it's a simple fact that gnome will determine the future of the linux
> desktop platform, simply because they have the people working on it and
> we don't.
> in fact, the pragmatic solution would be dropping the kde platform and
> concentrating on what we are good at: applications (and the underlying
> qt-based frameworks). and a workspace, for those 50% of our community
> who can believe in that plasma thingie.

Walking away from the platform will eventually leave us with no future other 
than chasing Gnome's tail-lights and patching around infrastructure that 
doesn't meet our needs.  If we leave Gnome to define the platform on their own 
then we let them define the desktop, and then we might as well all pack up and 
go home.

To remain relevent we need to not only remain engaged in defining the platform 
but increase our involvement, we've allowed too many of the recent platform 
changes to be defined without our involvement and our devs and users have 
suffered as a result.

The DS BoFs I participated in show that in most areas we can work productively 
with the Gnome developers and that they can benefit from working with us, we 
need to push those relationship building efforts more and stay engaged.  

Yes, reality is a lot of the platform now comes from funded Gnome / Red Hat 
work that we may not have the money or manpower to match, but that just means 
we have to learn to work with them where appropriate and leverage off the work 
they do.  The hard part is figuring out how to convince them that their 
solutions will be better with our involvement early on rather than tacked on 
at the end.

John.