Archiving KDE Telepathy?

[Ben Cooksley]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2022 at 9:26 AM Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> wrote:

> El dimarts, 25 d’octubre de 2022, a les 19:08:34 (CEST), Nicolas Fella va
> escriure:
> > 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.
>
> This thing you're describing in this paragraph is exactly what maintenance
> is,
> we're not building new roads nor adding new lanes to the existing roads,
> but
> we're making sure potholes get kind of fixed.
>
> >
> > 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.
>
> We shipped KDE Frameworks 5 on July 2014, but we still shipped
> Applications
> using kdelibs4 until August 2017.
>
> I don't see why we would do something different with the 5 to 6 transition.
>
> > 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.
>
> I disagree, unless you can prove it's more broken than it was when there
> were
> actual developers. Developers or new features don't count, users do count,
> if
> users can use the software there's no reason to discontinue anything.
>
> Note: I have no idea if it's broken or not, I've never used telepathy.
>

I guess that would be the first question then - is this something that
works, subject to some bitrot, or is it actually broken and of little use
to anyone (and therefore needs to be allowed to gracefully slip into an
archived state)?


>
> Cheers,
>   Albert
>

Regards,
Ben


>
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > Nico
>
>
>
>
>
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