Thoughts on the Iteration Sprint, discussions and criticism

[Dario Freddi]

This mail was originally born as a reply to the survey thread, but it
eventually drifted into something bigger which probably deserved his
own thread.

First of all I'd like to speak both with a Plasma hat (which I think I
always wore, at least somehow) and with an external hat, as it'll be
probably clear in the next lines. At the same time, I want to
underline these are my personal thoughts about all of this. The
purpose of this mail is to try to answer once at all some of the
recurring arguments against the planned sprint.


Starting from the very beginning, I honestly can't understand the
arguments about "we already have a vision". Assume this is true - this
vision was created (and eventually evolved) over the last, I think
now, 3 years. Maybe a bit more maybe a bit less, whatever. In the
highly changing time we live, that's an *enormous* span of time. The
question this sprint tries to answer is: do we need to create a
new/change the existing/keep the current vision for the workspace?
What should be our goal over the next months, especially for the
desktop? If I were an author of the original vision, I would be HAPPY
to see this happen and I would strive to take part in it. The argument
about names doesn't really stand - this is as clear as it gets, it is
a sprint for finding out who we are now and who we want to be. Does
this have a clear answer now? I don't think so.

Also, I'd like to point out that Plasma != Active. Active IS Plasma,
but Plasma IS NOT active. Plasma is (or should be) much more than
that, should focus on other platforms more than tablets. At the same
time, as much as consistency should be valued, it's arguably hard to
see a potential common vision for Active and the Desktop Shell. One
could have a common vision about Plasma as in *the framework*, but the
shells NEED to have different goals, targets and visions. If there is
a naming mismatch at all, it's here. What is Plasma then? A shell? A
framework? Something else? If Plasma == Active really stood, why the
need of a different name in the first place?

The answer, in my opinion, is quite easy: Plasma is something *to
build upon*. And as much as there are people working actively on
active (pun unintended), I guess you should be happy if there's people
who still care about the desktop and want to strive to make it a
better place to be. I would also like to note that there was not all
this ongoing bikeshed and worries when active was started/announced.

The question one should pose himself, in my opinion, should be: how
this could be harmful or beneficial to KDE? If we take apart our egos
and sentimentalism and try to see things in a rational way, there is
an obvious benefit in revaluing what (I personally believe - wouldn't
have worked on those if I didn't think so) were good ideas, but could
probably be laid down in a better way now, maybe with a spin of new
things. We learned from our mistakes and successes, and now we want to
see how we move forward. How could such a thing be harmful to KDE?

And to be 100% honest, I'm quite let down that almost every person
involved in Plasma (as in the framework/shell, not the workspace) at
the time of writing won't be there out of their own decision.
Alienating just because of a different name or intended purpose is a
dull argument - we communicated early, timely and *on plasma-devel*
most of all. If we compare this to the Active sprint, which was kind
of a fail from this perspective (even though there were a number of
factors not imputable to organizers which I reckon), I think we did
way better. It's hard to argue that people who are not coming are
feeling left out instead of leaving themselves out for their own
decision.

All in all and in fair honesty: I don't really like where this and
other threads are going. The feeling I am getting is that we are
trying to sacrifice a potential innovation just for the sake of
sticking to a goal which is not clearly defined and hasn't been
revised or maybe even shared by the people working/willing to work on
the project *now*. When Active was started everyone tried to be
positive about it and trusted people working on it. We are not
newbies. We know and love KDE and we are trying to do this just to
benefit KDE. A bit of trust in us would not hurt, just like we did
with Plasma, we did with Active, and will do with the next big thing
out there.

Ending this long mail: if you want to ask me for my proposed plans for
this "new vision", they're currently the following: improve what we
have, make it better, and get it up to speed with what we learned from
these years, and what we can do now which wasn't there in 2007. If
this is how you feel as well, then this discussion is pointless, and
we likely still have a couple free beds in the house. We're waiting
for you.