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List:       kde-mac
Subject:    Re: Install presence
From:       Ian Wadham <iandw.au () gmail ! com>
Date:       2021-06-19 1:54:08
Message-ID: 4EC73276-624B-4729-9D10-F35D91FB5181 () gmail ! com
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Hi Aleix,

> On 18 Jun 2021, at 10:59 pm, Aleix Pol <aleixpol@kde.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Ian,
> I had not received your message indeed.

I'm glad you have now… :-)

> My perspective towards the goal is first to assess the status quo and
> see if it's possible to increase the chances of people taking on these
> projects professionally somehow. Either by doing it themselves like
> Krita did or by having someone to do it through the KDE e.V. Or maybea mix of both.

I would strongly counsel against throwing money at the problem, if that is what you \
are suggesting. I have had first hand experience of the pitfalls of outsourcing.

Rather, I would repeat a suggestion I made in an interview with KDE Dot in 2014 which \
I quote here (see https://dot.kde.org/2014/06/03/ian-wadham-venerable-kde-programmer). \
The KDE Games apps referred to in the interview are KGoldrunner, Palapeli, KSudoku, \
Kubrick and KJumpingCube.

"Q. You've gotten the applications into good shape, and are ready to hand them off. \
What type of person would you like to see take over? What will they get out of \
working on these applications?

"A. I would like to see KDE set up a maintenance group and standards for \
"maintainability" of code. Programs that reach a reasonably good standard could then \
be maintained interchangeably by members of the group.

"The group could be continually changing. Nobody can stay interested in such work for \
long. Also the group and its stock of programs would be a good source of Junior Jobs \
and a place for newbies to start. It would need to have some experienced members, or \
ready access to such people, because some bugs are too hard for trainees to solve.

"This is not a new idea. It is roughly what has been happening everywhere I have \
worked since about 1967, when the burden of people quitting jobs and leaving behind \
unmaintainable, half-finished messes became intolerable for most organizations."

Something like that has already been happening informally on KDE Games, presided over \
by Albert Astals Cid.

As a result, all of the games were ported to KF5 and Qt5, even though almost all of \
them are "unmaintained". I was extremely grateful for this, because I was unable to \
do the porting myself and I was afraid that my years of work on the games would be \
lost. At the moment, the games are very stable re features (nobody is working on them \
:-)), but there are plenty of bug reports, mostly traceable to glitches in libraries, \
library usage or building FWICG. I see these on the kde-games-bugs@kde.org list from \
time to time and Albert and friends seem to tackle them fairly easily.

I would suggest that the KDE Community formalise such a group, give it credence and \
kudos and a good leader and see what transpires. I would suggest starting with a \
small list of apps and declare them to be "supported" (a new category for KDE). They \
would be picked on the basis of either having well-written, maintainable code (even \
though they may be currently "unmaintained") or for being extremely popular, not just \
with core developers but also with the general public. The "popular" apps might need \
quite a bit of work at first though… As the apps are licked into shape, more could \
be added to the "supported" list. It would be important, too, to rotate people \
through the group and give the leavers a crack at "real" development.

> Regarding mac, it's the platform I'm the least familiar with. My
> impression is that it's better that it's not populated at all than
> having every project feel half-baked there. We might need someone who
> cares to push through. But we also need to know it's worth the effort.

The initial port of KDE 4 was not done very well in MacPorts and I think KDE apps \
lost followers as a result. I came to it in 2010 and found there was even some \
hostility among MacPorts developers towards KDE 4 and its apps, mainly because of a \
heisenbug in meinproc (documentation formatting) which caused huge builds to crash at \
random on servers in the middle of the night. The MacPorts developers had to turn off \
the generation of KDE handbooks and guides, which would have lost friends among end \
users. René, Marko Kaening and I were able to get the KDE 4 apps running much \
better, but had no way to advertise the fact to users. KDE apps are only a few \
hundred among tens of thousands of FOSS apps, libraries, compilers and systems \
software on MacPorts. Then the KF5/Qt5 crunch came along. I suspect that potential \
users of KDE apps on Apple Mac have drifted away in the years since that.

So, maybe you are right - regrettably. It would be a huge effort to get current KDE \
releases to run in MacPorts. I think the MacPorts developers would provide help and \
advice, but a few years back Marko, René and I repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly \
asked for help and advice from KDE core developers and none was forthcoming.

Regarding the KDE 4 apps, many are running well on Apple OSX now and I use them \
daily. In the past few months I have even made three contributions to KDE Master, \
with the help of Albert doing the commits and initiating merge requests. I fear \
however that Apple may come out with a new version of its OS that makes it impossible \
to run the KDE 4 apps. Currently, other MacPorts apps have had a lot of problems with \
Apple OS 11, Big Sur, but I have not heard of any in KDE 4 (yet).

> My impression at the moment is that we should only be on platforms
> where we're present on their main apps forum rather than just lateral
> ones (F-Droid, Homebrew, downloadable msi or dmg files, etc).

That's your (KDE Community's) prerogative, but watch out for babies and bath water…

Cheers,
Ian W.


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