Plasma 5.22 Kickoff Notes

[Jonathan Riddell]

Jonathan, David E, Arjen, Noah, Carl, David R, Kai Uwe, Nate, Neal Gompa,
Nicofee, Aleix, Rik Mills, Sitter, Alexander L

= Plasma 5.22 kickoff meeting =

== 5.21 review ==

Feature freeze followed, not too much last minute panic.

Nate says a little bit buggier than he wanted.  VDG changes turned out to
be buggy in final release, not because they were merged on the last
release.  Complaints even from KDE developers.  Testing was done by VDG
with KDevelop and that was a problem area.  Hard to balance everything for
every app.

Some surprise at qqc2-breeze-style being included.  It felt rushed.
Question on which style is planned to be used (qqc2 desktop or breeze
style)?  For now mobile only.  It depends on what other devs think.  When
breeze qstyle is selected it would make sense to use qqc2-breeze-style.
Kai says maybe best to bite the bullet and use qqc2-breeze-style.  qt6
native style not very native.  Used for neochat on Windows.  Mac users want
apps that look like macs so don't put effort into making another style for
them.  Noah will still work on both.  David E suggests blogging about how
to change it manually before changing default in Plasma.  Consider
communicating changes to Breeze etc to distributions@ list.  VDG is
attracting a younger generation which is great but they don't always have
life experience and opinions can clash.  This release changed not just
defaults but existing user settings which is always likely to cause issues
somewhere with some people.  One idea now is single click to double click
change, but there's no mechanism to say "if unconfigured change this" (this
debate might be emotive).  Nate pointed to
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/issues/11 "Consider
permitting the user to choose whether they want changed defaults to take
effect on upgrade".

plasma-phone-components now stable

plasma-firewall - seems to work

kickoff menu - it's on the store to go back to the old one

promo announce and video worked well on review process.  video looked
awesome, it was not always accurate mind.

beta test day - "better than nothing" but announced too late, do it
louder.  Needs concrete agenda.  Could be moved to a weekend.  We could ask
for VMs for shells.com.

== Schedule and Qt deps ==

Qt 6 not yet ready for KF6.  KF6 will make some sort of schedule at their
sprint in March.

Our last Plasma 5 should be LTS.

We might move Plasma 5 to maintainance mode at some point and miss a
release or two but not yet.  Nicofee tried porting stuff to Qt 6 and found
lots of stuff can be done now in Qt 5.  A small number of things will be a
pain.  QTextEncoding so e.g. KCodecs will be tricky.  QStringLeft to
QStringView will be a pain.  Besides that it'll be alright.  QML 3 is
another issue, Qt 6.2 might have this, we can't think about porting Plasma
until this.  We have the option of QtQuick2 in Qt 6 which might be safer
transition.  It would be good if someone does a QML 3 API review to
highlight issues to Qt and us.

So stick to the current schdedule for Plasma 5.22, release in June with Qt
5.15.  Probably stick to the schedule for Plasma 5.23 but review that at
the time.

== 5.21.1 discuss ==

Nate went off agenda and discussed 5.21.1
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/355
Key repeat change had bad feedback, broke key repeat for keys without a
character popup.

== 5.22 plans ==

Add a character popup for long press keys?  (like mobiles have and mac has)

Wayland moving forwards.

Panel might become transparent when a maximised window is shown.  New
setting "adaptive transparent" and settings for always or never transparent.

Plasma PA code may get ported to its own extracted code which is now a
library.

Drop ksysguard but system monitor depends on ksysguard.  May need a new
repo for ksystemstats stuff and a new library.  ksysguard can be released
standalone to keep people happy if needed or just point to the old tar.

clang-format will be used on many repos to tidy up the code.  Frameworks is
doing it: https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kcoreaddons/-/issues/1  It can
then be run periodically to keep stuff in a consistent style.  Kate has
been doing it for years.

David R started moving repos to SPDX licencing.  It stalled a bit.  He
requests others to help.

David E in apps you can click Help-> About for authors and that's missing
for Plasma.  Contributor list might help onboarding.  A feature we could do
is a kinfocentre with list of names.  David R suggests adding it for
Plasmoids. Authors can also be added to appstream files.

Carl brought up Kirigami addons.  Plasma shell should depend on it.

Nicolas F has cleaned cmake code recently.  e.g. variables become imported
targets.  cmake version dep could be made consistent to 3.16.  distros to
be consulted.  it would be great to get all the ECM commands for targets.

Look at regressions bugs:
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&keywords=regression%2C%20&keywords_type=allwords&known_name=VHI-priority%20Plasma%20regressions&list_id=1843417&priority=VHI&product=Bluedevil&product=Breeze&product=Discover&product=drkonqi&product=frameworks-kirigami&product=frameworks-plasma&product=frameworks-qqc2-desktop-style&product=kactivitymanagerd&product=kde-gtk-config&product=kdeplasma-addons&product=khelpcenter&product=kinfocenter&product=klipper&product=kmenuedit&product=krunner&product=KScreen&product=kscreenlocker&product=ksmserver&product=ksysguard&product=KSystemLog&product=kwin&product=Plasma%20SDK&product=Plasma%20Vault&product=Plasma%20Workspace%20Wallpapers&product=plasma-integration&product=plasma-nm&product=plasma-pa&product=plasma-simplemenu&product=plasmashell&product=policykit-kde-agent-1&product=Powerdevil&product=print-manager&product=printer-applet&product=pulseaudio-qt&product=systemsettings&product=Touchpad-KCM&product=user-manager&product=xdg-desktop-portal-kde&query_based_on=VHI-priority%20Plasma%20regressions&query_format=advanced

Freedesktop Power-Profiles-Daemon.  Offers e.g. "high performance mode"
"powersave mode" which is from firmware but also other changes.  Gnome has
a UI for this.  We have a plan to add something similar.  Arjen said it
seems unfinished currently.  Powerdevil API can be extended to make it an
option.  Upstream project could be improved.

jumplist library.  Kai did some more thinking on it.  A library which does
e.g. recent documents on task bar jump lists.  Probably not in 5.22.
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