Hello, May is upon us, flowers are blooming, temperature is rising... time for another quick recap on the progresses (or lack thereof) in the kdelibs splitting department. I'll also present the revised backlog for May and following months.
# What happened in April? Unfortunately no split was completed in April. It mainly comes from less availability of the volunteers for those splits than expected. But it has also been caused by some disagreement showing up regarding the ongoing splitting of big chunks of kdeui (basically a clash between the "let's make a try and iterate" vs "let's decide on what to do of the classes and apply" approaches). The real bad news is that it effectively turned down the people helping on kdeui. The good news is that we're now having the discussion on finding the (hopefully) final splitting lines in kdeui. That works was done for kdecore in Platform 11, but not really exhaustively for kdeui so far. Perhaps that'll lead us to finally dealing with kdeui once and for all. # What should happen in May? So for May we'll try to keep the risk low: low number of splits, as remote from kdeui as possible, preferrably already started. We're planning on three splits to be completed in May: * karchive, it's been long in the making, Mario is working on it and not much is left to complete it; * kconfig, David started the work on it already, it's somewhat independent already, and Benjamin volunteered to finish it... we have no maintainer for it though; * kidletime, the only one not started, somewhat independent though, Dario is the maintainer. # Beyond May? I used the opportunity of the April hiccup to rework the plans we had so far for the splitting (already effective for May). We're going to have smaller batches than previous months, which means the plan now goes all the way into November now. Also, I changed some of the ordering to have anything touching kdeui out of the way until July. The frameworks planned for May and June have of course some use of kdeui, but that should be minor and easily ported away (assuming I didn't miss a critical dependency). This way, the discussions over kdeui can occur in parallel without disrupting or blocking the ongoing splits for the coming two months. The idea being to nail down kdeui splitting in July. I think it'll be the perfect time for that as: a) two months should be far enough to agree on the splitting lines and b) beginning of July will see Akademy, it'll be the perfect time to frantically hack the kdeui splitting and make it real. # Maintainers (still) needed. We have no known maintainers for the future frameworks to be processed apart from plasma, karchive, kbookmarks, kidletime and kio*. Short term I think I'll simply remove the "have a maintainer" constraint from the definition of done of a split as it obviously seems to not be a good representation of a split anyway (I introduced it as a mean to push for volunteers but the effect seems to be disappearning now). Anyone disagreeing with that change? Longer term, it is a rather concerning prospect IMO. We must find a solution for that sooner rather than later to avoid a big batch of frameworks with no maintainers. Ideas are very welcome in that department... I'd like to note however that it's not really a new situation. Some of you might remember I mentionned for a while that we operate on the "dfaure as default maintainer" scheme... I still think it's unhealthy, but the splitting work makes it more visible. Feedback welcome as usual. Regards. -- Kévin Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net KDAB - proud patron of KDE, http://www.kdab.com
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