Plasma Team Communication & Development Practices [MUST READ]

[Ben Cooksley]

*Pulls up a chair*

We need to have a talk. The way things are proceeding currently in
regards to how you (the Plasma folks) work with the rest of us is
severely and fundamentally broken. Which means we need to fix it.

Lets start with development practices. Over the past few weeks, there
have been at least two instances where things have been unbuildable,
for several days, and have only been fixed after i've essentially
hunted down the responsible developers. One instance is currently
outstanding.

In one case code was introduced which depended on a new version than
was allowed. The other case was a failure to update the dependency
metadata.

Some might say these issues are minor. Apart from the fact they're in
Frameworks which means they have repercussions on everyone else who
develops software using KDE Technology. The fact they've also been
ignored for *days* is also not great either.

Now on to communication. As above I mentioned developers were
ignoring, or otherwise failing to take action on, notices that these
breakages were present in the above. Not cool!!

We also had an issue recently where a project which had asked to be
incubated nearly ended up slipping through the cracks, had I not
pinged a Sysadmin ticket they had opened earlier about the whole
thing.

Given one of the things we want to improve is new contributor
onboarding, this isn't a good look.

Do you have any ideas on how we might fix this?

Regards,
Ben Cooksley
KDE Sysadmin