[Kexi-devel] State of Proposal to improving KDE Software Repository Organization?

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi,

(calligra-devel, kexi-devel, kimageshop mailinglists only for heads-up,
 please remove from reply, discussion only on kde-core-devel should be fine)

4 months ago there was the thread "Proposal to improving KDE Software 
Repository Organization" on this mailinglist.
What happened to that plan? Are people preparing its execution?

And would that be a time where some bigger reorganization of the repos is 
possible?

Reason that I ask is that due to the split of Calligra into several repos (see 
background^) the layout in the repo structure does no longer properly reflect 
the project organisation. Right now there are three active repos in the 
calligra/ repo substructure:
"calligra" at "calligra/"
"krita"    at "calligra/krita"
"kexi"     at "calligra/kexi"

(("calligra" at "calligra/" confuses at least kdesrc-build, sent an email to 
mpyne about if moving it to "calligra/calligra" should fix it.))

Things that are not properly matching organization:
* Krita starting with 3.* no longer is part of Calligra project
  (screws e.g. api.kde.org/bundled-apps-api/calligra-apidocs/ and also
  what people think to which project Krita belongs)
* Calligra & Krita are nowhere different to KDevelop, Digikam & Co,
  so no reason to be in a complete own toplevel structure,
  rather should be in the same sub structure, i.e. "Extragear",
  like extragear/calligra/* and extragear/graphics/krita

More, not only Calligra & Krita related:
* "Extragear" is an awful grouping name for apps with individual
  release plans, a legacy term that no longer fits most of the apps
  in that substructure
* "KDE Applications" is a misleading grouping name for apps with a
  central release plan, as if those with individual release plans
  are not "KDE" applications (as in, not done in the KDE community)
* a single category per app as needed by the current tree structure layout
  of the repos, like "office", "graphics", "utils", is rather awkward,
  many apps do not match exactly one or would match multiple categories

So IMHO some update of the repository organisation would be good, to reflect 
how things are these days.
Renaming of "Extragear" and "KDE Applications" is surely something which needs 
care from promo/marketing/VDG people first to find if that makes sense at all 
and what a good solution would be.
(Being both maintainer of Okteta, which is in "KDE Applications", and meta-co-
maintainer of Calligra, which is not, but still done in the very same KDE 
community, that current naming seems so wrong to me).

But the actual names and grouping aside, for the pure technical renewing 
(which also involves all infrastructure like translation system, 
documentation, phabricator, etc), who is currently planning or working on 
what?
So does it makes sense to wait some more, or should we assume the current 
organization stays for longer, and Calligra & Krita repos should be moved 
inside that organization for now?


^Some background about Calligra repo split, as things are slightly 
complicated:

KRITA)  The "krita" repo was split off, because Krita has finally become a 
full project of its own, separate from Calligra. A logical place for the krita 
repo in the KDE repo structure would perhaps have been somewhere in extragear, 
but at least due to the translators preferring to keep the string catalogs of 
Krita in the "calligra" module as before, for less work, the krita repo was 
for now put as submodule of "calligra/".

KEXI)  Kexi continues to be part of the Calligra project/subcommunity, but the 
Kexi developers preferred a small simple repo "kexi" of their own (for build 
time and size). So the placement at "calligra/kexi" makes perfect sense.

OTHERAPPS)  As the other Calligra apps (Braindump, Karbon, Sheets, Words, 
Stage, etc.) are more tightly coupled and the binary interfaces between libs, 
plugins & apps can still change every other week, for now no further repo 
splitting is planned (to ensure atomic commits on API changes), and they all 
stay in the existing "calligra" repo.


Cheers
Friedrich