Exiv2 project submission to the KDE community

[Johannes Zarl-Zierl]

Dear Alex & Robin,

[Re-adding the list-address because there are people who know better than me 
there and to me it looks like the list was dropped by accident]

> Thank you for your enthusiastic and kind reply. You're right. With no plan
> we meant that we haven't made up our minds for anything beyond fall 2021
> due to the lack of a sustainable maintainer-ship model. That is something
> which needs to be sorted out but at the moment we don't know how!

Thanks for clarifying.

> We have seen the incubator process which is on the webpage. How would this
> work?

There are other people on this list that can probably explain better than me 
(and who have first-hand experience with the process), but I'll try to answer 
to the best of my knowledge:

> Would the Exiv2 project be required to transfer all the history of
> git, issues, pull request etc. to a new location within the KDE environment
> or could the project stay where it is at the moment?

Short answer: yes, you need to move. @sysadmin: Is the migration tool 
available on invent.kde.org?

Longer answer: If your project was not hosted on Github it would theoretically 
be possible to remain there, but not very practical.

To look at it from the positive side: only by moving to KDE infrastructure you 
can take full advantage of what KDE has to offer you.

I mean knowing that you have financial, organizational, and legal support from 
one of the bigger FLOSS communities is cool, but have you ever experienced a 
situation where:

* An international team of phenomenal translators take care of all your 
localization needs to the point it almost seems like magic?

* Community members actively triage bugs so that you don't have to deal with 
every duplicate bug report yourself?

* The CI not only builds your own software on multiple platforms but several 
projects that depend on it - so you get feedback if a change accidentally 
breaks downstream projects? (I hope I'm not overselling on this point)




> Could you elaborate a
> bit on the process and what would be required from our end to be done? In
> order to get the resources and plan the transition we would need to do some
> forecasting on the work and plan it accordingly.

That's the part where I kindly refer you to more experienced people on this 
list who have sponsored an incubator project before.

> Regarding the applications for grants, that is something very interesting
> but many of us have day-to-day jobs and the question would be if someone
> would leave his job and step into this uncertainty. I don't know if someone
> would do it or not. Mostly likely it would depend on the amount of money
> and security etc.

Understandable. I just wanted to make sure that you are aware of the 
possibility.


Cheers,
  Johannes