Information regarding upcoming Gitlab Migration

[Ian Wadham]

Um, guys… Google is your friend...

I am a former KDE Games developer. I play KPatience quite a lot, as well as other games to keep my brain active, especially during COVID-19 lockdown. Recently I thought I could see where the answer lay to three bugs in the solver(s), two in the Forty Eight variant and one, very recently reported, in the Klondike variant. So I thought I would have a look at the source code to see if my hypotheses might be correct and maybe work out a patch.

My first problem was to track down where the repos that I need are and how to clone read-only copies. I didn’t even know what websites they are on any more and KPatience is actually called kpat in the code (which I remembered). However I can google “source code KDE KPatience” and the pat repository comes up as the first hit, presumably because “KPatience” is used in the repository’s description. Again “… card games” got the repo as hit 2 and “… solitaire” (the American term for such games) got it as the first hit.

I have also found that several of the tricky cases mentioned earlier in this thread can be resolved with Google search terms beginning “source code KDE xxx”. For example, seeing xxx as “Plasma Mobile” get the repo as hit 2. And just using “go” as xxx finds the Kigo repository as hit 3. Even a search with xxx = “loderunner” finds the KGoldRunner repository as hit 1, even though Loderunner is not mentioned in the repository’s description. I wonder how far down repositories Google indexing goes. Even using xxx = “lode runner” (2 words), as suggested by Google, finds the KGoldrunner Handbook, though not the repository. Still, a smart newbie might guess the name used for that type of game in KDE and refine his source code search accordingly.

Even after I found the kpat repository, I could not understand where the souce code was getting the card decks it uses. I knew from memory that they are in some library somewhere, but there is no libkdecards. Googling with xxx = something like “library cards” found the cards as a sub-directory of the libkdegames repository.

So my suggestion is to keep whatever categories you like, including multiple categories as required, as long as the category names are in plain English, not KDE jargon. In addition, please continue to pepper repository descriptions with search terms (words) that are easy for laymen and non-core KDE developers to find.

Another possibility is to construct (automatically) a text-file “catalog” with one line for each of the 1000+ repositories, containing (at least) the repo name and description, but maybe other keywords. Then people could just “grep” and “sort” it to find what they wanted. 

My 2 cents,
Ian Wadham.

> On 28 Apr 2020, at 2:46 pm, Bhushan Shah <bshah at kde.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Olivier,
> 
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 10:49:46PM +0200, Olivier Churlaud wrote:
>>> Because in order to search for something, you need to know it exists.
>>> 
>>> If you are just casually browsing, then the search can't help you.
>> 
>> I don't think people casually browse our repos. What use case is more likely to happen and do we want to support? 
> 
> We don't really want to discard use-cases just because it does not suit
> our workflow. That is not how we are going to gain new contributors, we
> should value each contribution, be it drive-by contribution, or focused
> contribution towards one single project.
> 
>> Use case 1 : Jerry learns about KDE and go in their forge in the Multimedia section. After carefully reading the code of two applications and three libs he starts contributing to Elisa. 
>> 
>> Use case 2 : While using her Ubuntu installation of Elisa / while reading on reddit about Elisa, Jerry decides to try to contribute to this project/fix this bug that itches her and searches for it in KDE's forge. 
> 
> Let me add a some more usecases, some of which I've been dealing with in
> project I maintain.
> 
> Use case 3 : Tom comes in Plasma Mobile channel and asks for Plasma
> Mobile applications source code
> 
> Use case 4 : Tom is a student in Germany and is interested in
> contributing to wikitolearn, and he asks where can I find code of the
> wikitolearn?
> 
> Suggestion offered by sysadmin team does not cater to one single
> use-case, but offers a way to provide a solution to all 4 usecases. For
> Plasma Mobile team or Wikitolearn team it would be much easier to refer
> contributors to the https://invent.kde.org/plasma-mobile or
> https://invent.kde.org/wikitolearn then tell them to go to
> https://invent.kde.org/KDE and search for the tag wikitolearn or Plasma
> Mobile.
> 
>> On the other hand, I think the discussion about spotting open merge requests (in a derived thread from this one) should be answered, being by relevant tags, subgroups or whatever. 
> 
> (super personal note)
> 
> Ironically, Usecase 1 is how I started contributing to KDE 7 years back.
> While I was inspired by battery monitor re-design in 4.11 release, I
> wanted to work on "something" so I did literally browse through various
> repositories to find something where my technical capabilities were
> enough to work on [1]. Back then it was projects.kde.org (chiliproject
> installation).
> 
> [1] https://blog.bshah.in/2013/09/01/hello-planet/
> 
> -- 
> Bhushan Shah
> http://blog.bshah.in
> IRC Nick : bshah on Freenode
> GPG key fingerprint : 0AAC 775B B643 7A8D 9AF7 A3AC FE07 8411 7FBC E11D