[Kde-imaging] Future of KIPI - waitaminute, please

[Achim Bohnet]

On Monday 30 January 2006 20:06, Jesper K. Pedersen wrote:
> On Monday 30 January 2006 12:54, Gilles Caulier wrote:
> | Le Lundi 30 Janvier 2006 15:41, Jesper K. Pedersen a écrit :
> | > First of all, please excuse me the late answer, I'm on a business trip
> | > (well I'm with a customer, and has been so since September).
> | >
> | > I'm the developer of KPhotoAlbum (previously known as KimDaBa), and I
> | > strongly urges you to reconsider killing KIPI.
> | >
> | > I agree that I haven't contributed much to KIPI lately, but on the other
> | > hand I don't contribute much to other libraries that KPhotoAlbum uses,
> | > such as KDE-libs, KExiv2 etc.
> | > On my side I considered KIPI in good hands and went on focuses on other
> | > parts. I haven't implemented a single feature in KPhotoAlbum that could
> | > have been located in KIPI, actually on the contrary, I'm slowly working
> | > on a Bibble integration plugin.
> | >
> | > My contribution to KIPI are on the other hand not non-existent - I try to
> | > keep it at a marketing level. I did for example do a KIPI tutorial at the
> | > latest KDE conference, and in one of the upcoming month there is a large
> | > article on KIPI on a German Linux magazine.
> | >
> | > Besides I spent literally man month up front designing+developing KIPI,
> | > and doing the basic port of most digiKam plugins to KIPI, with a lot of
> | > help from Gilles.
> | >
> | > As I said, I strongly urges you to keep KIPI alive, if not for me, then
> | > for all the users we share, who enjoyes their favorite features in all of
> | > the KIPI enabled applications.
> |
> | Hi Jesper,
> |
> | I'm sorry to give a bad sound here, but about me, I have waiting too long a
> | response from others kipi hosts main developpers about any important
> | subject relevant of future of libkipi/kipi-plugins.
> I'm not entirely sure what you refer to here, but if you are talking about the 
> delay in my response to this thread, you might have considered CC'ing me on 
> the initial post.
> 
> | About kipi, i think to share plugins between many hosts application is a
> | great idea... if, and only if... there are most than one, two, or tree
> | developpers/maintenor in the team (typically me, Joern, and Tom)
> Well with that argument, you also suggest that we should inline tools like 
> exif libraries maintained by only a few people.
> 
> If you are asking for help on the KIPI plugins, why don't you say so?

AFAIU here the list of open problems aka vacant jobs ;)

	o reports about kipi-plugins need an active reviewer
	o nobody has time for the pile of bugs listed in b.k.o
	o ne release coordinator/manager
	o kipi API v2
		o delayed loading API changes (proposed some month ago)
		o support for metadata exchange: tags, comments, ...
		o < more!? >
	  
I _assume_ the last point about the API is the problem that triggered this
discussioin: when noone cares about kipi-plugins it's easier to just copy
a plugin and add the missing functionality without the need to
care about API stability and release management.

Please correct my when I'm worng but also add to this list
your pending TODO items.

All that is needed is someone that cares about kipi-plugin 
(and not about the apps using it ;)
> 
> How about at least postponing the decision till after my KIPI article has been 
> posted, that article might actually generate some new developers. 

An kipi article is a very good thing!

There is one other thing that might be good for kipi PR.   Since I saw 'kim'
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=11505  I know kipi-plugins
can be a superior kim-ng.   All that's needed is a little commandline tool,
e.g.,

	kipiexec <kipi-plugin>  file-or-url ...

I would like to try this, but as usual: no free time yet.  For someone how
knows libkipi + C++ it's maybe easy.  Feel free to steal the idea ;)

Achim
> 
> | Like computer sience engineer, i think that creating old digikamplugins to
> | kipi-plugins have very increased the entropy of plugins. There are too many
> | bugs report in B.K.O for digikam team. This is why kipi is in this state at
> | now.
> |
> | Personally, i have concentrate my efforts since one year to develop
> | DigikamImagePlugins, and now digiKam core. There is no way for me to
> | support/manage/hack an another large project like kipi. This sound is hard
> | to say for me : I have developped 60% of plugins in the past...
> Sorry, but I don't see how that is changing anything from killing KIPI.
> 
> Kind regards
> Jesper.
> 
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> 

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