Moving Baloo and Baloo-widgets into KDE SC

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hey,

On Friday, January 10, 2014 11:02:22 Mario Fux KDE ML wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 09. Januar 2014, 23.26:01 schrieb Àlex Fiestas:

> > If the breakage is minimal (which I know it is, but I will let vHanda
> > reply
> > to that) I vote to replace it even if we make a bit worse the experience
> > using some weird application that nobody has heard of.
> 
> The release schedule for 4.13 is really short (4 month). With the feature 
> freeze in approx. 1.5 months, see [1]. 
> 
> As 4.13 will be one of our last release in the 4 era I think we should be 
> quite sure that we don't break anything or even more to be 110% sure to
> have  fallbacks, migration, APIs for Nepomuk apps to access Baloo data etc.
> 
> And even though I know that Vishesh is doing a great and a hell of a job
> I'm  not too sure if one single person can manage all of this (not just the
> implementation but I think it needs a lot of testing as well).
> 
> IIRC it's still not clear for all the current Nepomuk apps if they work
> after  4.13. Let's try to list them again.
> 
> - Amarok (got Nepomuk support with 2.7, will it work after 4.13?

If it's ported...

> - Digikam (gets new Nepomuk with 4.0.0 due in May or so. Will it work)?

Maybe this feature is worth delaying then?

> - Dolphin
> - Gwenview
> - Conquiere
> - KPhotoalbum
> - Kamoso (seems so be ready in time)
> - Kdenlive (out of the most popular KDE apps, with some man power problems 
> atm, ok, but nonetheless)
> - Nepomuk-webminer and Nepomuktvnamer

Let me point out the obvious here: We can discuss possible quality problems 
for a few more weeks, *OR* we use the time to actually test the code on a 
wider range of systems. This way we wouldn't have to guess so much about 
possible impact to other apps, and we can judge much better how ready Baloo 
is. 

Don't see Baloo as a third party service that someone else has to fix and 
debug, rather get on the train, test it, report your experience and make it 
possible to get it solidly working.

> - Plasma Active/Plasma mobile with Share-Like-Connect

There's no Plasma Active release planned based on 4.x APIs, so this one can 
just be ignored until there's a clear and concrete roadmap. Likely, the next 
Plasma Active release will be folded into the Plasma workspaces anyway.
Besides that, Plasma Active will be benefitting a lot from Baloo, since it's 
typically run on smaller devices. The pain here is limited since there are not 
too many users currently, and the parts of the system interfacing with Nepomuk 
(and Baloo in the future) are rather well defined.

> And another question. Will people who used Nepomuk extensively lose data? I 
> know that Nepomuk was one of the most hated software, but there were and
> are people who like(d) and love(d) it.

I think this question has been answered a few times already, even in this 
thread.

> So in conclusion I think that a change of Nepomuk to Baloo in 4.x without a 
> 100% (very very well tested!) migration plan and testing is a no-go (from
> my side, just me). I've the strong feeling that such big changes are for
> something like kf5 and a port of the apps to kf5.

I'm not strictly against this. Actually, we have some lenience with the long 
term support workspace out, so we can recommend people to use that, if they're 
slightly more adventurous, run 4.13, if they are completely mad, help us 
getting Plasma 2 in shape. That's quite a nice array of options. Communicated 
in the right way to our downstreams, this helps us to avoid problems.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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