[Owncloud] ownCloud and KDE

[Matthew Dawson]

Hi,

My only questions is, how are you going to administer write access to the repository? Are you only going to allow a few trusted people, then work through merge requests? As I understood it, the kde-developers group is no longer supported, or is at least deprecated.

To be clear, I'm not objecting, I just want to make sure the move has a well defined plan behind it.

Matthew

Frank Karlitschek <karlitschek at kde.org> wrote:

Hi,

In the past few weeks we had some discussion in the ownCloud community about the relationship between ownCloud and KDE. Some of our core people raised the question if it is good for ownCloud to be a part of KDE or if it is holding us back. Some users from the outside might consider ownCloud the KDE only cloud solutions instead of a cross platform and cross desktop software. 
Other developers think that it is overly complicated for new contributors to use the KDE git infrastructure compared with independent ones like github or gitorious. 
Other developers said that it is not obvious to the outside that ownCloud is not using KDE libraries and people can contribute without being a KDE developer or user.

After some discussion on the mailinglist, during our BoF session, on IRC and in person I want to summarize the arguments and suggest a solution.

I think that KDE is a great community and a very welcoming place for developers. ownCloud is not a typical KDE project but we can benefit a lot from being a part of KDE. 

Being part of KDE
- Infrastructure like wiki, mailinglists, bugtracker, ..
- Friendly community
- Organizational and financial support from KDE e.V.
- Possibility to market ownCloud together with other KDE software.
- We share the same goals


Being independent from KDE
- Better outreach to contributors outside KDE. (He had over 40 clones of ownCloud on gitorious but only a fraction on the current KDE git. We currently have external clones on gitorious and github. This shows that not every contributor is happy with developing at the KDE sever, but we don´t want to lose those developers, it´s easier to attract new php developers outside KDE)

- We don´t profit a lot from the benefits of the central KDE repo like translations, buildsystem, SC releases and so on.

- gitorious/github has a less steep learning curve.
(I helped a few new developers to contribute to ownCloud lately and I agree that github and gitorious are significantly more straight forward for beginners)

- Better workflow for web applications (transiflex, …)


For me the solution is obvious. I want ownCloud to stay a KDE project because KDE is a great community with great people. ownCloud and KDE share the same goals als Stu described in his Desktop Summit keynote.
But we should move our main git repository to gitorious again because this fit´s our needs better and we can attract more php developers more easily. There is also other KDE software which is hosted outside the main KDE repository and I don´t think it is a requirement for being part of KDE.
This means that the KDE sysadmin won´t help us with the administration of the repos of course but I think we can handle it because we also did this in the past.

I think this is a good solution, which combines the wishes of both groups. So I suggest moving the ownCloud repo back to gitorious.org/owncloud at the end of this month if no one objects.

What do you think?

Cheers
Frank



Frank Karlitschek
karlitschek at kde.org


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