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List:       kde-frameworks-devel
Subject:    Re: Information regarding upcoming Gitlab Migration
From:       Ian Wadham <iandw.au () gmail ! com>
Date:       2020-04-28 9:44:39
Message-ID: 3992BFBF-73BA-4060-A854-17C1A9803B22 () gmail ! com
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Um, guys… Google is your friend...

I am a former KDE Games developer. I play KPatience quite a lot, as well as other games to keep \
my brain active, especially during COVID-19 lockdown. Recently I thought I could see where the \
answer lay to three bugs in the solver(s), two in the Forty Eight variant and one, very \
recently reported, in the Klondike variant. So I thought I would have a look at the source code \
to see if my hypotheses might be correct and maybe work out a patch.

My first problem was to track down where the repos that I need are and how to clone read-only \
copies. I didn't even know what websites they are on any more and KPatience is actually called \
kpat in the code (which I remembered). However I can google "source code KDE KPatience" and the \
pat repository comes up as the first hit, presumably because "KPatience" is used in the \
repository's description. Again "… card games" got the repo as hit 2 and "… solitaire" (the \
American term for such games) got it as the first hit.

I have also found that several of the tricky cases mentioned earlier in this thread can be \
resolved with Google search terms beginning "source code KDE xxx". For example, seeing xxx as \
"Plasma Mobile" get the repo as hit 2. And just using "go" as xxx finds the Kigo repository as \
hit 3. Even a search with xxx = "loderunner" finds the KGoldRunner repository as hit 1, even \
though Loderunner is not mentioned in the repository's description. I wonder how far down \
repositories Google indexing goes. Even using xxx = "lode runner" (2 words), as suggested by \
Google, finds the KGoldrunner Handbook, though not the repository. Still, a smart newbie might \
guess the name used for that type of game in KDE and refine his source code search accordingly.

Even after I found the kpat repository, I could not understand where the souce code was getting \
the card decks it uses. I knew from memory that they are in some library somewhere, but there \
is no libkdecards. Googling with xxx = something like "library cards" found the cards as a \
sub-directory of the libkdegames repository.

So my suggestion is to keep whatever categories you like, including multiple categories as \
required, as long as the category names are in plain English, not KDE jargon. In addition, \
please continue to pepper repository descriptions with search terms (words) that are easy for \
laymen and non-core KDE developers to find.

Another possibility is to construct (automatically) a text-file "catalog" with one line for \
each of the 1000+ repositories, containing (at least) the repo name and description, but maybe \
other keywords. Then people could just "grep" and "sort" it to find what they wanted. 

My 2 cents,
Ian Wadham.

> On 28 Apr 2020, at 2:46 pm, Bhushan Shah <bshah@kde.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Olivier,
> 
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 10:49:46PM +0200, Olivier Churlaud wrote:
> > > Because in order to search for something, you need to know it exists.
> > > 
> > > If you are just casually browsing, then the search can't help you.
> > 
> > I don't think people casually browse our repos. What use case is more likely to happen and \
> > do we want to support? 
> 
> We don't really want to discard use-cases just because it does not suit
> our workflow. That is not how we are going to gain new contributors, we
> should value each contribution, be it drive-by contribution, or focused
> contribution towards one single project.
> 
> > Use case 1 : Jerry learns about KDE and go in their forge in the Multimedia section. After \
> > carefully reading the code of two applications and three libs he starts contributing to \
> > Elisa.  
> > Use case 2 : While using her Ubuntu installation of Elisa / while reading on reddit about \
> > Elisa, Jerry decides to try to contribute to this project/fix this bug that itches her and \
> > searches for it in KDE's forge. 
> 
> Let me add a some more usecases, some of which I've been dealing with in
> project I maintain.
> 
> Use case 3 : Tom comes in Plasma Mobile channel and asks for Plasma
> Mobile applications source code
> 
> Use case 4 : Tom is a student in Germany and is interested in
> contributing to wikitolearn, and he asks where can I find code of the
> wikitolearn?
> 
> Suggestion offered by sysadmin team does not cater to one single
> use-case, but offers a way to provide a solution to all 4 usecases. For
> Plasma Mobile team or Wikitolearn team it would be much easier to refer
> contributors to the https://invent.kde.org/plasma-mobile or
> https://invent.kde.org/wikitolearn then tell them to go to
> https://invent.kde.org/KDE and search for the tag wikitolearn or Plasma
> Mobile.
> 
> > On the other hand, I think the discussion about spotting open merge requests (in a derived \
> > thread from this one) should be answered, being by relevant tags, subgroups or whatever. 
> 
> (super personal note)
> 
> Ironically, Usecase 1 is how I started contributing to KDE 7 years back.
> While I was inspired by battery monitor re-design in 4.11 release, I
> wanted to work on "something" so I did literally browse through various
> repositories to find something where my technical capabilities were
> enough to work on [1]. Back then it was projects.kde.org (chiliproject
> installation).
> 
> [1] https://blog.bshah.in/2013/09/01/hello-planet/
> 
> -- 
> Bhushan Shah
> http://blog.bshah.in
> IRC Nick : bshah on Freenode
> GPG key fingerprint : 0AAC 775B B643 7A8D 9AF7 A3AC FE07 8411 7FBC E11D


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