From kde-community Wed Jan 15 21:56:14 2014 From: John Layt Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 21:56:14 +0000 To: kde-community Subject: Re: [kde-community] Applications in KDE Generation 5 Message-Id: X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-community&m=138982299930335 On 15 January 2014 22:15, Luigi Toscano wrote: > John Layt wrote: >> One other thing I would do is change our app lifecycle slightly. I'd >> introduce a new status of Deprecated that lies between Released and >> Unmaintained, for apps like Kopete and KPPP that are no longer >> relevant for most people or are being replaced, but may still have >> limited use and so need to be kept alive for a while. I'd envision a >> new lifecycle metadata attribute that looks something like >> Experimental -> Incubator -> Stable -> Deprecated -> Unmaintained, >> with only Stable apps eligible to be included in the regular >> Applications release cycle. > > Just my 2 cents here: I would be careful with this kind of lifecycle. An > application with low activity (almost unmaintained) can be still stable for a > long time, given our committment to binary compatibility. This is true > especially for small applications, but it is something that should be considered. Yes, stable would have a fairly wide definition, but that's deliberate so it does include things like KCalc that really don't change much and don't need much work done to them. Perhaps an extra proviso of "actively maintained" would be needed to be included in the regular release cycle, where active means a named person as maintainer who triages any bugs. > Also, I would be careful to use the word "deprecated" for applications like > Kopete, where Ktp has not covered all the functionalities (yet); also Kopete > receives changes/fixes. This is for the 4.x world, at least (if Kopete is not > ported to 5 the problem is solved, but otherwise the problem still holds). Yeap, the terminology comes from me being a libraries person, deprecated api for us means still working and supported, we just think there's a better option so we won't put much effort into improving it. If there's a better word to use for normal people then that would be fine :-) One benefit from looking at the apps in this way will be to decide what does and doesn't get ported, labelling something as unmaintained says don't bother, deprecated would be port only if you really need it and don't make too much effort modernising it (use kde4support). Of course, if someone really wants to keep Kopete going they're welcome to do the work required and to take on maintainer status, and that would qualify for regular release status, but achieving that extra level of being included in Essentials would require wider community support, and I see that position in the future belonging to Ktp. That's really what this email is about, getting those sorts of conversations going about specific apps so we know where to start once KF5 goes final. Cheers! John. _______________________________________________ kde-community mailing list kde-community@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community