Manner in which kde-gtk-config development is conducted

[Ben Cooksley]

Hi all,

In recent days the repository `kde-gtk-config` has had a string of
issues with the CI system which raises serious questions concerning
the development practices of this project.

The first violation was a compilation failure introduced following the
commit of changes in https://phabricator.kde.org/D28076. This failure
was completely ignored by all involved developers, including the
Plasma community in general until I raised the matter by commenting on
the original review - several days after the fact.

This is unacceptable - part of the agreed rules for all code committed
to KDE repositories is that it compiles.

The second violation, which took place only a few hours after the
initial breakage was corrected, was an unannounced change to the
dependencies of the project which took place as a result of code
reviewed in https://phabricator.kde.org/D28086

As has been discussed on these lists many times in the past, it is a
requirement for changes to the external dependencies of projects to be
communicated to the maintainers of the CI system in advance of the
change itself being made.

No such communication was done in this case. Once again this is unacceptable.

I therefore conclude that the development of kde-gtk-config is being
conducted in a matter which is not consistent with that of a KDE
project, which means that the repository is no longer eligible to form
part of a KDE release module and should be moved to Playground.

Comments welcome. Please note that simply fixing the dependency
breakage in this case is not enough to resolve this - there are
underlying issues which need to be addressed here.

Regards,
Ben Cooksley
KDE Sysadmin