[KPhotoAlbum] Upcoming changes in KPhotoAlbum

[Johannes Zarl-Zierl]

Hi everybody!

As part of being maintainer, I'd like to give semi-regular updates on the 
state of the project, and in the planned changes for the upcoming releases. 
Let's see how this pans out...

# Organizational Changes

Generally speaking, I want to integrate KPhotoAlbum closer with the greater 
KDE community. One example where this already happened is the KPhotoAlbum page 
on Phabricator[1]. While not a huge difference, this already enabled some 
contributions from people outside this mailing list.


[1] https://phabricator.kde.org/project/profile/255/


# Source Code Changes

## Planned Deprecation: KIPI

As you probably notices, KIPI was abandoned by the digikam project in favor of 
their new DPlugin interface. Johnathan Riddel was so nice to do a (last?) 
stand-alone release of the KIPI plugins, but it is generally agreed upon that 
all users of the interface should migrate to other solutions.
Therefore, KIPI will probably be removed around the end of the year.


## New Feature: Purpose Integration

KDE Frameworks has grown a new plugin specifications by the name of "Purpose". 
The interface is already used by spectacle and other programs. Though 
currently limited in scope, this may prove a viable replacement for KIPI. 
Either way, for export plugins, Purpose is already usable and will be part of 
kphotoalbum v5.6.


## The great refactoring

The KPhotoAlbum code base shows its age at some points. My goal is to reduce 
technical debt and to separate core-logic from the GUI where possible. This is 
an important step towards more ambitious goals, such as improving the database 
backend or creating a command-line interface.
I have already started the process, but with other things happening as well 
this is likely a project that will accompany us at least into the next year.


## Clang-format

This may be of interest to anyone who has some patches lying around. We will 
re-format the entire code-base some time after the v5.5 release, probably in 
July. For new patches, this should make your life easier, because you won't 
hear me bickering anymore about some tabs-vs-spaces trivialities.
If you already have your patch, you can probably save yourself some work by 
upstreaming it before that date.


Cheers,
  Johannes
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