State of Proposal to improving KDE Software Repository Organization?

[Ben Cooksley]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 7:28 AM, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau
<kossebau at kde.org> wrote:
> Hi,

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?

That plan is tied up in other things taking priority / lack of time / etc.
We'll get there eventually. It is also in part related to the Phabricator move.

>
> 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.))

Repositories within repositories is a known bad thing to do, the
systems don't handle it properly at all (as it was never an intended
thing you should do). The proper fix is to move the repo to
calligra/calligra (ie. have a "calligra/" top level grouping project).

>
> 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

In the Phabricator world I had envisioned Extragear as no longer existing.

>
> 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

Phabricator will allow multiple "categories" to be tagged to a repository...

>
> 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.

Extragear is really an internal structure, not part of marketing so I
think we can go ahead and just kill it...

> (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?

Like most things in this department, Sysadmin...

> 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?

Not sure how long things are going to take sorry.
Chances are the existing tree will survive in some form (even if it is
only in the XML file various things use) so you may as well do it 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

Regards,
Ben