PIM versioning and dependencies

[Ben Cooksley]

Hi all,

We have a little bit of an issue in PIM at the moment. It can be
broken down into 3 separate issues, but overall from my perspective
the PIM team is violating established practice in the community.

The first issue concerns the dependency bump to Qt 5.8. This has not
announced or discussed on any community wide list, either prior or
after the bump was made. As a consequence of this, a series of
Extragear applications which previously could be built on FreeBSD can
no longer be built.

The second issue concerns maintenance of our internal metadata files,
which define the dependencies between various bits of KDE software.
These files are used by the CI system to provision dependencies, and
kdesrc-build to sequence items to be built.

Since the last release was branched the PIM developers have added a
new dependency to kdepim-runtime. This change happened well over a
week ago, and they have yet to update the metadata files accordingly.
While this may seem minor, if someone is trying to build a single
application and it's corresponding dependencies they'll run into
problems because neither the CI system or kdesrc-build will know about
this new dependency they've added.

The third issue concerns the practice of version management within
PIM. Currently the master branch of PIM is broken because it appears
that one or more repositories have been missed in the latest round of
bumping.

Can the PIM developers please provide an explanation for these various
breakages which they've made?

Cheers,
Ben