VDG approved widgets

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Tuesday, March 08, 2016 21:48:10 kainz.a wrote:
> Some of the plasmoids are really awesome in style and usability. This hard
> work from the developers would we support with an VDG approved "sticker"
> to  the widget explorer icons so the user know which plasmoids are
> aweseome. In addition the not VDG approved widget developers want to have
> also the VDG sticker and make usefull usability and design changes. So the
> quality will get better and better. This would also work for GHNS stuff.

I think the general idea of vetting plasmoids makes a lot of sense, however:

- Why "VDG approved"? (This means it looks good, but the user is not looking 
for "looks good", but for high quality, which also entails code quality, 
maintenance questions, using the right APIs so it works well consistently 
across a number of cases, respect for privacy, etc.).

- The VDG is really an implementation detail, why should we make this visible 
to the user? How many users know what "a VDG" is, and why should they care?

- As Martin K. already said, how can we prevent users from just claiming that 
it's "approved" in one way or the other? I can very well imagine that a 3rd 
party plasmoid dev just takes over most of the metadata, and that he wants his 
work to be presented in a popular place (after all, my fart app is the most 
important and useful piece of software in the world!), they'll just copy the 
badges

- What about updates? You hand out a badge once, then the dev (or someone 
else) screws it up, is the badge still valid? Our code can also be forked, 
what about those cases?

- Reviewing takes time and skill, do we have that kind of manpower?

My thinking is that we should only ship plasmoids which would get such a stamp 
of approval, anything which doesn't needs fixing or should not be part of 
Plasma. So this badge of approval would really only be useful for 3rd party 
plasmoids (or extensions).

Martin G. suggests signing, and that in fact also solves a bunch of other 
issues unrelated to this "quality badge". Moreover, we already have some 
basics for that implemented for plasmoids (we had plans to sign plasmoids 
earlier).

I think while the idea is good, we have to put some thinking into how we can 
achieve the desired results without creating some hollow marketing trick (our 
users are generally very critical in that regard) and it should be both 
effective and practical, otherwise we're just wasting time.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

Sebastian Kügler    |    http://vizZzion.org    |     http://kde.org