What can we expect from our developers

[Sune Vuorela]

On 2024-01-29, Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org> wrote:
> This sort of comment  makes me really sad. The All About the Apps goal,
> which in principle is still ongoing, was an attempt to get KDE developers
> to realise it was important not just to write apps but to actually make
> them available to users, I find it astonishing how we still don't have a
> culture where making our apps available to users is part of our
> responsibility.  There's teams in KDE to help with all these formats.
> Sorry to complain here as the issue is larger than just this one app but
> it's so sad that nobody within KDE wants to help get users using our
> software directly.

I think this is taking it too far. I think the goal is more about not
getting in the way of people who wants to do this.

We need to draw a line somewhere about what we expect from *all* of our
developers.

I don't think that we can expect all of our developers to be great at
 * c++
 * qtquick
 * cmake
 * windows weirdness
 * linux weirdness
 * freebsd weirdness
 * osx weirdness
 * android weirdness
 * packaging flatpaks, appimages, snaps, debs, rpm, .. for linux
 * making osx installers
 * making apk's
 * making windows installers
Beside the domain of the application.

Yet it is kind of what we are doing with having gating CI setups for
many of these, and adding more.

I'm quite a seasoned developer and I know I can't care for all of that.
I also don't have the time to care for all of these.

We also don't have extra manpower in the teams that knows about these to
help everywhere.

We might have a goal about this, but this is just far too many thing to
be good at everything.

I don't think we should shame individual developers for also realizing
this.

But where should we draw the line ?

/Sune