Archiving KDE Telepathy?

[Nicolas Fella]

Hi,

there various KTP modules have seen very little development over the
last years. Most of the activity that did happen was either release
housekeeping stuff like version bumps or general code cleanup (i.e. the
kind of cleanup that some people do across the whole KDE codebase and
not necessarily out of a genuine interest in KTP). There is also no
significant activity around it on bugs.kde.org.

While certainly amazing in its vision it anecdotally never fully made
use of that potential, partly because it's just trying to solve a
problem that is really hard to solve.

Most of the activity I see around KTP is from people trying to use it
out of curiosity but finding it broken/unpolished or not what they
expected it to be. We like to say that "Everything in KDE Gear is
maintained". I'd argue that from this follows that if it isn't actually
maintained we should drop it from the Gear releases.  We are doing our
users a disservice by pretending something is maintained when it
actually isn't. We are also doing ourselves a disservice since
unpolished software "leaking" into the desktop experience is going to
make the whole product appear unpolished.

Furthermore, with the transition to Qt6 very soon now we should make a
decision: Either we invest a non-trivial amount of work into making it
work against Qt6/KF6, or we pronounce it dead. Having it "alive" but
unported isn't helping anyone in the long term.

Therefore I propose that we stop releasing the various ktp- modules with
KDE Gear and archive the repositories after the last relevant KDE Gear
cycle finished.

Cheers

Nico