Feedback from an application developer

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

2009/8/21 Thomas Friedrichsmeier <thomas.friedrichsmeier at ruhr-uni-bochum.de>:
> On Friday 21 August 2009, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
>> > the freedom to set release cycles that are often much
>> > shorter, and sometimes much longer than KDE's...
>>
>> This is not. There are tons of apps in KDE svn that have their own release
>> cycle: amarok, k3b, koffice just to name a few prominent ones.
>
> Ok, true. But if the suggestion was to move that moving to KDE svn would have
> the benefit of more or less "automagic" package creation, then - all other
> issues aside - I don't see that happening on my own release schedule.

Not automagic, but if you compare:
1. using emerge + kde-windows-installer within the team of experienced
engineers,
2. using handwritten and externally managed NSIS/whatever custom tool

- the result is so often that one spends time on maintenance ofthe
deployment system instead on designing and coding or suporting
users/customers. I have the 2nd way in my portfolio too.

> Anyway, my point was that I don't want to move rkward to KDE svn. And unless
> you expect and want *every* third party KDE based project to move into KDE
> svn, the KDE windows installer could be made more friendly to third parties
> (see the original mail).

It's of course your choice (and even I would say it is valuable
validation) to have 3rd party projects hosted elsewhere.
But looks like the point of independent infrastructure is not that
important in our discussion since you depend on SourceForge, right? ;)
I didn't say "managed elsewhere" because really except for svn
accounts, I do not see anyone from the (great anyway) "kde core" lib
team "managing" our releases or schedules.  After all you probably
already  follow and align to KDE shedules, e.g. you use some stable
KDElibs version, build system, etc. So we really are not that
different in this regard.
Personally I would also say that it's never reasonable to say that
your app is _too_ specialized for being part of the KDE offering (KDE
as a project, not just desktop). E.g. Krita has very much specialized
code inside, and yet it's a well known member of the Team.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 Kexi & KOffice (http://www.kexi-project.org, http://www.koffice.org)
 KDE Libraries for MS Windows (http://windows.kde.org)
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek