New maintainers wanted: KDE Telepathy, KAccounts, Plasma Notifications and others

[Alexander Akulich]

Hi Martin and everyone.

I would like to take over the KDE Telepathy maintainership.

I understand that Telepathy is a huge and complex project that needs a
lot of manpower to actually come back, but there is no other project
with the same goals and capabilities. For me, Telepathy is not the
exact specification, but an idea of IM system with replaceable
components that give you a freedom to combine whatever you want across
operation systems, desktop environments, and programming languages
with the best rate of shared code and system integration.

I can spend two hours and write a long list of reasons why Telepathy
is the right thing to do, but please let me spend this time on the
development to prove my arguments by deed and not by words.
On the other hand, I don't want to fail someone's expectations, so
please continue to not expect much. :)

I think that in the current era of proprietary IM services, such
integrated and yet distributed solution has a chance to prove itself
with open protocols such as Matrix, Telegram (MTProto), XMPP, Tox,
Slack, IRC, SIP (reSIProcate), Gitter, Rocket.Chat, Signal, Discord
and so on. For sure the list can meet the demands of some users.

I have interest, ideas, experience, and prototypes. Now I have some
time to start checking out features one by one. I'm already a
maintainer of TelepathyQt (I released the last three versions), but
the library and services mean nothing without a client. I have some
pending reviews for 10 months [1] and if nobody reviews them then
maybe it will be right to become a maintainer and start to land them.

As a maintainer, I'll also take responsibility for bug fixing (as a
start I committed three bug fixes at the last three days).

P.S.: If you're going to support Matrix then please, please! develop a
good library. I don't want to offend anyone, but QMatrixClient needs a
lot of improvements and maybe you can help. With a good library (such
as QXmpp) a Telepathy service implementation would consist of about 2k
lines of code.

[1] https://phabricator.kde.org/D12751


On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 10:08 PM Martin Klapetek
<martin.klapetek at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> as I got a new job unrelated to KDE couple months ago, I'm finding myself having less and less time and motivation to keep up with my maintainer's duties. Therefore I think it's time to pass on some of the KDE things that have my name in the "maintainer" field.
>
> First off, there's the whole notifications stack, which includes KNotifications framework, the fdo notifications server and finally Plasma's popup notifications. The whole stack is relatively simple and does not require much attention, but it could use some forward pushing to not be stuck in 2009 anymore.
>
> Staying in the Plasma land, I'd really like to hand the whole clock + calendar stack to a dedicated maintainer. This is the bottom-right part of the default Plasma panel - the clock applet, the calendar applet, the backend for these applets, calendar events, proper timezones support and all the pieces around. These things can get quite complex to grasp and improve, yet are a crucial part of the desktop experience and deserve much more attention than they get now.
>
> KAccounts, the system to set up your online accounts, could use some much needed improvements and expansions as well as integrating with the new Akonadi/Sink/Kube-thing. If the last part will not happen, and it certainly doesn't look like it will, I'm afraid that KAccounts in Plasma would no longer serve its purpose and would become a burden rather than a useful system component.
>
> The last one and the biggest one - the 12 repos of KDE Telepathy. Now this project is effectively dead. It hasn't seen any real development for more than a year and basically is just on life support ever since the core team had to leave the project because of job and life constraints. The other factor is also the wide spread of mobile phones and mobile IM clients; chatting on the desktop in not entirely modern interfaces with limited protocol support is not as popular these days. But it would still be nice to have someone at least oversee the couple of incoming patches every now and then.
>
> I think that at least the first two stacks are totally vital for Plasma desktop and really need some attention. If you'd like to put your name on any of the things above, please let me know. I'll make sure to do a proper hand-off with explaining everything :)
>
> Cheers
> --
> Martin Klapetek
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