The KIPI fate

[Albert Astals Cid]

In December KIPI support was removed from gwenview and spectacle with this commit message


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    Drop KIPI support
    
    KIPI offers export functionality for various external services
    
    However it has been abandoned from its original authors and receives no real development any more
    
    A lot, if not all of its providers are defunct and it severly lacks UI polish
    
    Gwenview already has integration with Purpose which offers a similar (albeit theoretically reduced) functionality with a much more polished experience
************

I disagreed loudly on IRC, because we:

 * If we had to remove things that "receives no real development" we would remove more than half of KDE Gear, remember again, no new features doesn't mean that the software is not maintained.

 * "A lot, if not all of its providers are defunct" that's just simply not true since upon removal i went and tested various of the providers.

 * "severly lacks UI polish" *SO WHAT*

 * "integration with Purpose" useless unless Purpose starts supporting all the providers that KIPI used to support. Unsurprisingly, Purpose has not gained any new plugin support since December

This means that for the KDE Gear 22.04 release both gwenview and spectacle will have less features for our users for no real reason, it's not even that the code removed has hard to maintain in those two applications, it was not more than 500 lines of code in isolated classes.

Personally I would really like to revert those changes, but if not, I would like a wider confirmation that we have decided we don't care about our users that were potentially using those features (we have no way of knowning if 3 or 3 million) and if that's the case just archive libkipi and kipi-plugins on invent.kde.org so we can stop releasing and translating them.

Cheers,
  Albert