New Application Status

Ingo Klöcker kloecker at kde.org
Tue Dec 3 08:02:25 GMT 2024


On Dienstag, 3. Dezember 2024 01:17:41 Mitteleuropäische Normalzeit Justin 
Zobel wrote:
> I'm a bit frustrated by our new application development pipeline.
> 
> I see applications appear on apps.kde.org and in official namespaces on
> GitLab before they have passed KDE Review.

In my opinion you are conflating two completely different things. Let's discuss 
them separately.

Let's start with apps.kde.org.

> I feel this is falsely advertising to the world that the app is ready
> for use.

I agree that this could be improved. A possible solution would be to use the 
brand-new lifecycle attribute in repo-metadata to clearly mark apps that 
haven't passed KDE Review as beta. I don't think that hiding them from 
apps.kde.org is a fair solution. On the contrary, I think having beta apps on 
apps.kde.org could possibly attract the attention of other developers who'd be 
interested in working on a new app and of beta users who'd be interested in 
giving the app a try. The possibility to get early feedback is a key value of 
FOSS. "Release early. Release often."

https://community.kde.org/Policies/Application_Lifecycle clearly documents 
what differentiates playground projects from reviewed projects (although this 
wiki page needs to be updated to mention the new lifecycle attribute instead 
of the old projectpath attribute). I think it's just a matter of making this 
information more visible to avoid wrong expectations.

> The button on apps.kde.org that says 'Install on Linux' takes me to
> Discover and then tells me that the app was not found in any software
> repositories.

Is "passing KDE Review" really connected in any way to "packaged by some 
distro"? I guess that's a question only distro packagers can answer.

> It also tells me to report this to my distribution which can lead to
> noise on distro bug trackers. It can also lead to noise on the KDE bug
> tracker because a user wants to install the application but can't.

Discover probably shouldn't do this for beta apps. I have no idea how the beta 
state could be communicated to Discover. Is there something suitable in 
AppStream? I didn't see something obvious; we could probably use tags. To 
avoid duplicate information this should somehow be added automatically based 
on the lifecyle attribute in repo-metadata.

Now GitLab namespaces

> I think keeping applications in user namespaces until it has passed KDE
> Review would solve both of these problems.

I think keeping applications in user namespaces until they have passed KDE
Review is an excellent way to hide them from potential co-contributors. Maybe 
it's just me because I don't read blogs, follow people on any s.m. and don't 
scour GitLab user namespaces for interesting projects, but I have never 
stumbled accidentally over an interesting project hidden in a user namespace.

Regards,
Ingo
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