Stepping down from KDE SIG

[than]

Kevin,

Thank you very much for your great contributions to the kde-sig over the years and
wish you all the best.

Than


Am 29.10.2015 um 17:00 schrieb Kevin Kofler:
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> kde mailing list
> kde at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/kde
> New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org