Stepping down from KDE SIG

Fri Oct 30 08:36:00 UTC 2015

Kevin,
I hope to meet you one day in Vienna or here in Brno again :). Thanks
for everything (and your - I'll come to Brno and show you how to do it
- in your words ;-).

Btw. I still think Plasma 5 is the best "KDE" version ever (with small
glitches). No flame, I enjoy using it.

Jaroslav

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 5:00 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> in recent times, I have been increasingly unable and unwilling to adequately
> (co)maintain the huge set of packages known as the KDE Software Compilation
> (i.e., the union of the KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Frameworks and KDE
> Applications release sets), which I will refer to as "KDE SC" in this mail.
>
> * unable because:
>   - the set of packages keeps growing and growing (mainly due to splitting of
>     existing packages). The KDE SC used to be about a dozen packages. When a new
>     release came out, it could be updated to manually (without any scripts) by
>     one person in about a day. These days, we are talking about hundreds of
>     packages. (I am supposedly comaintaining over 300 packages at the moment.)
>     Those packages are impossible to deal with without scripts, and even those
>     scripts take hours to run (and require some amount of babysitting because
>     things such as rebasing patches cannot always be automated). The same
>     phenomenon also affects Qt, at a slightly smaller scale. Back in the day, I
>     felt confident about having a global view on the KDE SC packages. This is no
>     longer the case.
>   - I am having an increasingly hard time keeping up with the latest evolutions
>     that the KDE Project releases. Right now, I am still running Plasma 4 and am
>     highly unfamiliar with Plasma 5. This means I am out of touch with the
>     issues our users are reporting and also have only limited ability to test
>     any fixes.
>   - big parts of the KDE Plasma Workspaces are now written in QML, a language I
>     am also not very familiar with.
>   - for varying reasons (job, etc.), I have found myself having nowhere near
>     enough time to dedicate to KDE SC packaging lately. I am drowning under
>     bugmail, and have found myself unable to even READ all of it at times, let
>     alone act on it. The poor quality of KMail 2 (see below) is not helping, and
>     neither will the F23 release that accidentally defaults to ABRT instead of
>     DrKonqi (see below). I am basically the only true volunteer left in the SIG,
>     and the time I can invest in Fedora packaging is finite.
>
> * unwilling because:
>   - the way the Fedora Project has been treating KDE since Fedora 21 (when
>     "Fedora.Next" was introduced) makes me feel like a second-class citizen
>     in the Fedora community. After years of fighting for equal treatment of KDE
>     in Fedora, Fedora.Next with its "Fedora is now more focused" (on GNOME)
>     message was a major setback and a huge disappointment. (Another symptom of
>     this evolution is how the PackageKit backend was rewritten with only the
>     exact feature set GNOME Software happens to need, leaving Apper utterly
>     broken.)
>   - the evergrowing package set (see above) is making it increasingly painful
>     and boring to maintain KDE SC packages.
>   - the Akonadi/KMail stack has been a huge pain to use, due to major serious
>     issues, both performance and reliability issues. Upstream has been either
>     unwilling or unable to do anything about the problem, none of the fixes so
>     far really helped in any way. I am unwilling to have anything further to do
>     with this abomination of software.
>   - while I have not experienced it personally yet, the quality of KDE Plasma 5
>     is also reported to be very disappointing; the promise from KDE 4.0 times
>     that "KDE 5" (as it was referred to at the time) would be an evolutionary
>     rather than a revolutionary release was not followed through.
>   - the Fedora 23 KDE Spin (which is now final or almost final) is easily the
>     worst KDE Spin we have ever released:
>     . Firefox, a non-KDE and even non-Qt application, is the default browser. It
>       does not integrate into the Plasma desktop in any way.
>     . Due to an oversight, DrKonqi is missing, and thus ABRT (another non-KDE
>       application) is the default crash handler. ABRT reports all the crashes to
>       us downstream packagers instead of upstream where the crash reports
>       belong. And experience has shown that the ABRT fire&forget reporters are
>       unwilling to upstream the bug reports manually, if they even read our
>       replies at all (and that's if we even manage to reply to all the bugs to
>       begin with).
>     Both of these are complete no-gos where I have said from day one that those
>     are not acceptable. The Firefox fiasco was a deliberate decision, the ABRT
>     fiasco could have been avoided if DrKonqi had not been made optional against
>     my recommendation, and/or if people had actually tested that the KDE Spin
>     uses the KDE crash handler. I do not want to be held responsible for these
>     decisions I did not approve of.
>
> As a result, I AM HEREBY STEPPING DOWN FROM THE KDE SIG AND FROM
> (CO)MAINTAINERSHIP OF KDE SC PACKAGES.
>
> In particular, effective NOW:
> * I hereby request to be removed from the group::kde-sig group.
> * I will withdraw my comaintainership (including watchbugzilla and
>   watchcommits!) of Qt and of all packages in the KDE SC, EXCEPT:
>   - the packages for which I am upstream: kompare, libkomparediff2
>   - compatibility packages: qt3, kdelibs3, qt(4), kdelibs(4), kdewebdev (3),
>                             kdegames3
> * I may also withdraw comaintainership of, or orphan where I am the point of
>   contact, any packages that I am maintaining because the KDE SC depends on it,
>   and possibly selected other KDE-related packages.
> * I am stepping down from being a voting member in the KDE SIG. I leave it to
>   the remaining members to nominate a replacement or reduce the member count.
> * I am stepping down as a moderator of the fedora-kde mailing list. I already
>   cleared the moderation flag of the one person I have put on moderation. This
>   list moderation is an additional duty that I just do not have time for.
> * I am stepping down as an operator of the #fedora-kde IRC chan. (You should
>   also remove the operator privileges from tigcc_bot. It does not need them, it
>   was only symbolic.)
> * I will no longer consider it my duty to attend KDE SIG meetings, though I may
>   attend some meetings as an interested user. In particular, I will no longer
>   lead any meetings and I will not try to herd people into attending (the
>   necessity of which has always been annoying me).
>
> I will KEEP (until further notice):
> * my Fedora packager status,
> * my provenpackager privileges in Fedora,
> * my packager sponsor privileges in Fedora,
> * (co)maintainership of a reasonable number of packages that I can actually
>   scale to (i.e., NOT the current 300-400), including:
>   - as mentioned above, the Kompare stack and the compatibility packages,
>   - KDE-related packages outside of the KDE SC (though possibly fewer than now),
>   - the Calamares installer,
>   - some non-KDE packages,
> * taking care of the compatibility libraries that make existing applications
>   work (the Qt3/kdelibs3 stack right now, the Qt4/kdelibs4 stack if and when
>   needed) and of legacy applications themselves,
> * developing Kannolo (what the Fedora KDE Spin SHOULD be), to which I hope being
>   able to devote more time than now,
> * maintainership of Kompare upstream (for now), unless another maintainer with
>   more time can finally be found,
> * using and promoting (to the current extent) Fedora with KDE (be it the KDE
>   Spin or Kannolo).
>
> I am sorry, but after 8 years of volunteering and ending up with almost 400
> packages to take care of, I just have to scale down. It was fun while it lasted.
> I wish the remaining KDE SIG members good luck for the future.
>
> Kind regards,
>         Kevin Kofler
>
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