Install presence

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Aleix,

> On 18 Jun 2021, at 10:59 pm, Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Ian,
> I had not received your message indeed.

I’m glad you have now… :-)

> My perspective towards the goal is first to assess the status quo and
> see if it's possible to increase the chances of people taking on these
> projects professionally somehow. Either by doing it themselves like
> Krita did or by having someone to do it through the KDE e.V. Or maybea mix of both.

I would strongly counsel against throwing money at the problem, if that is what you are suggesting. I have had first hand experience of the pitfalls of outsourcing.

Rather, I would repeat a suggestion I made in an interview with KDE Dot in 2014 which I quote here (see https://dot.kde.org/2014/06/03/ian-wadham-venerable-kde-programmer). The KDE Games apps referred to in the interview are KGoldrunner, Palapeli, KSudoku, Kubrick and KJumpingCube.

“Q. You’ve gotten the applications into good shape, and are ready to hand them off. What type of person would you like to see take over? What will they get out of working on these applications?

“A. I would like to see KDE set up a maintenance group and standards for "maintainability" of code. Programs that reach a reasonably good standard could then be maintained interchangeably by members of the group.

"The group could be continually changing. Nobody can stay interested in such work for long. Also the group and its stock of programs would be a good source of Junior Jobs and a place for newbies to start. It would need to have some experienced members, or ready access to such people, because some bugs are too hard for trainees to solve.

"This is not a new idea. It is roughly what has been happening everywhere I have worked since about 1967, when the burden of people quitting jobs and leaving behind unmaintainable, half-finished messes became intolerable for most organizations.”

Something like that has already been happening informally on KDE Games, presided over by Albert Astals Cid.

As a result, all of the games were ported to KF5 and Qt5, even though almost all of them are "unmaintained”. I was extremely grateful for this, because I was unable to do the porting myself and I was afraid that my years of work on the games would be lost. At the moment, the games are very stable re features (nobody is working on them :-)), but there are plenty of bug reports, mostly traceable to glitches in libraries, library usage or building FWICG. I see these on the kde-games-bugs at kde.org list from time to time and Albert and friends seem to tackle them fairly easily.

I would suggest that the KDE Community formalise such a group, give it credence and kudos and a good leader and see what transpires. I would suggest starting with a small list of apps and declare them to be “supported” (a new category for KDE). They would be picked on the basis of either having well-written, maintainable code (even though they may be currently “unmaintained”) or for being extremely popular, not just with core developers but also with the general public. The “popular” apps might need quite a bit of work at first though… As the apps are licked into shape, more could be added to the “supported" list. It would be important, too, to rotate people through the group and give the leavers a crack at “real” development.

> Regarding mac, it's the platform I'm the least familiar with. My
> impression is that it's better that it's not populated at all than
> having every project feel half-baked there. We might need someone who
> cares to push through. But we also need to know it's worth the effort.

The initial port of KDE 4 was not done very well in MacPorts and I think KDE apps lost followers as a result. I came to it in 2010 and found there was even some hostility among MacPorts developers towards KDE 4 and its apps, mainly because of a heisenbug in meinproc (documentation formatting) which caused huge builds to crash at random on servers in the middle of the night. The MacPorts developers had to turn off the generation of KDE handbooks and guides, which would have lost friends among end users. René, Marko Kaening and I were able to get the KDE 4 apps running much better, but had no way to advertise the fact to users. KDE apps are only a few hundred among tens of thousands of FOSS apps, libraries, compilers and systems software on MacPorts. Then the KF5/Qt5 crunch came along. I suspect that potential users of KDE apps on Apple Mac have drifted away in the years since that.

So, maybe you are right - regrettably. It would be a huge effort to get current KDE releases to run in MacPorts. I think the MacPorts developers would provide help and advice, but a few years back Marko, René and I repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly asked for help and advice from KDE core developers and none was forthcoming.

Regarding the KDE 4 apps, many are running well on Apple OSX now and I use them daily. In the past few months I have even made three contributions to KDE Master, with the help of Albert doing the commits and initiating merge requests. I fear however that Apple may come out with a new version of its OS that makes it impossible to run the KDE 4 apps. Currently, other MacPorts apps have had a lot of problems with Apple OS 11, Big Sur, but I have not heard of any in KDE 4 (yet).

> My impression at the moment is that we should only be on platforms
> where we're present on their main apps forum rather than just lateral
> ones (F-Droid, Homebrew, downloadable msi or dmg files, etc).

That’s your (KDE Community’s) prerogative, but watch out for babies and bath water…

Cheers,
Ian W.