Hi, I'm the App Stores Support Engineer guy

[Halla Rempt]

On woensdag 7 september 2022 10:43:06 CEST Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> Hi Krita people,
> 
> as you may have read on the community mailing list [1], I'm taking on the role 
> of App Stores Support Engineer for KDE.

Hi Ingo!

> 
> Aleix Pol wrote:
> "Ingo will be working with the different teams in KDE towards our
> infrastructure getting prepared to have their software delivered to
> the platforms they are targetting. With this, we hope to improve the
> reach of our products to end users and hopefully enable them also to
> make a living with their KDE products."
> 
> You do already publish Krita in the Windows Store (and the Steam and Epic 
> stores) which is awesome. But there's probably still room for improvement.
> 

Note that the main reason we put Krita in stores is to generate income that can be used to sponsor development. That's different from e.g. Kate.

> Here are a few questions I'm interested in:
> 
> a) Where can I find more information about your building and publishing 
> process? Who should I talk to in your team?

That would be me for Windows Store and Epic, Sharaf for Android and Emmet for Steam. 

> b) Are there things you wish the KDE infrastructure would better support with 
> regard to building for different platforms and publishing in different app 
> stores?

I'm quite happy with the binary factory which produces artefacts that we can upload; we use our own scripts there, not Craft, though.

> c) Are there things in the KDE Frameworks that should be improved to ease 
> building for different platforms, e.g. do you patch some KDE Frameworks when 
> you create builds for Windows or macOS?

Yes, heavily. And we are behind with updating to new versions of frameworks. We also patch the heck out of Qt 5.12, because newer versions of Qt are too buggy and the incredibly dumb release policy of the Qt company.

> d) Do you want to target more platforms and/or app stores, e.g. the Apple 
> Store?

We are working on that, and already have everything setup to upload there, once we solve the sandbox problem: because macos app store applications are sandboxed like on Android, but the api's are vague, users cannot open or save files or use file layers in an app store version of Krita

Ivan is the one working on that, but it's a pretty tough problem and there isn't visible progress yet.

The iPadOS store is not a target, because of GPL.

> e) Are there tasks/issues on some task board or issue tracker that I should 
> look at?

This might be interesting to you: https://phabricator.kde.org/T14359

> 
> f) Is this mailing list the right place to talk about this?

Yes -- though we're also always around on #krita in libera.net.

> 
> Regards,
> Ingo
> 
> [1] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2022q3/007274.html