Exiv2 project submission to the KDE community

[Johannes Zarl-Zierl]

Dear Alex and Robin,

As maintainer of KPhotoAlbum I want to thank you for creating and maintaining 
Exiv2 over the years! Exiv2 is basically the de-facto standard when it comes 
to writing any kind of image handling application.

Not directly related to the topic at hand, but have you considered applying 
for a grant at the core infrastructure initiative [1]? It seems that at least 
some problems of the recent past (such as an influx of automated security bug 
reports overwhelming the core development team) could be partly solved with 
grant money.


> The Exiv2 project is hosted at the moment on GitHub (
> https://github.com/Exiv2/exiv2). We would like to evaluate the possibility
> of onboarding the Exiv2 project into the KDE community.

In case that you did not already see it, you can read about the incubator 
process here: https://community.kde.org/Incubator
I would be proud to have Exiv2 join the KDE community!

As far as I can see there are 6 core contributors that intend to remain 
committed to Exiv2?
The sentence "There is no active plan for development of Exiv2 beyond 2021" in 
the issue 1466 sounds rather glumly. I assume (hope?) that the sentence is 
missing something like "...if no sustainable maintainership-model can be 
found"?

> Last Saturday (2021-02-27) there was a meeting concerning the future of the
> Exiv2 and we tried to find a new maintainer.  Regrettably because of the
> time demand imposed on the maintainer, no one volunteered.  By joining the
> KDE community we hope to address this issue and keep this important project
> alive. The meeting notes can be found on the GitHub issue (
> https://github.com/Exiv2/exiv2/issues/1466).

Joining the KDE project will not magically bring about a new maintainer as I 
am sure you are aware. That being said, the benefits[2] of being a KDE project 
may lift some of the day-to-day burdens that a maintainer would otherwise have 
to deal with on their own.

Talking about my own experience: maybe adopting some kind of group-
maintainership in the short to mid term can help with the transition. Becoming 
the maintainer for a project can feel like a daunting task at first 
(especially if the previous maintainer did a good job). Having such a 
transition period allows a potential new maintainer to grow into the role...

Kind regards and cheers,
  Johannes Zarl-Zierl




[1] https://www.coreinfrastructure.org
[2] https://manifesto.kde.org/benefits.html