Manner in which kde-gtk-config development is conducted

[Carson Black]

First up: I would like to apologize for submitting and landing
https://phabricator.kde.org/D28076 and
https://phabricator.kde.org/D28086 without properly checking that
everything was behaving as it should.

For the initial breakage of https://phabricator.kde.org/D28076, I
failed to check that it built from a clean directory after changing
CMake files.
For https://phabricator.kde.org/D28086, I erroneously thought that
giomm was already a dependency of kde-gtk-config because I didn't
notice that ${GTK_GIOMM_LIBRARY} in
https://cgit.kde.org/kde-gtk-config.git/tree/gtkproxies/CMakeLists.txt#n12
wasn't defined anywhere.

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

While we didn't notify y'all about the new dependency, I thought this
was already a dependency as stated above and didn't think much of it.
I will keep this in mind for when I do intentionally add new
dependencies.

> 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.

I can understand your frustration with us approving and committing
faulty code, but we didn't ignore it. While I failed to revert my
changes after both Mikhail and I noticed that it failed to build from
source only a few hours after landing, we were aware and discussing it
in the thread.

> 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.

I feel as long as everyone involved understands what went wrong with
these two patches, we should avoid this problem again in the future.

Thanks for understanding,
Carson Black [ jan Pontaoski ]

Am Fr., 20. März 2020 um 20:32 Uhr schrieb Ben Cooksley <bcooksley at kde.org>:
>
> 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