On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 2:43 PM Kamil Paral <kparal@redhat.com> wrote:
I haven't received much feedback on this proposal. On test list and kde list, there was a short follow-up regarding the list of release-blocking applications. On kde list, Kevin disagreed because it lowers the guaranteed quality bar for KDE, but he didn't continue discussing it with me. I haven't received any alternative proposals either. On desktop list, there was silence, but Chris Murphy gave me a thumbs up on IRC.

I'll give it a few more days, and unless somebody yells hard (and ideally also provides some constructive ways how to optimize desktop testing, because we need to cut it down /somehow/), I'll put the change into effect. I'll also probably move the help viewer into the list of release-blocking applications, based on the discussion I saw.

I talked to Rex Dieter and Kevin Kofler on #fedora-kde IRC, and they raised a concern about about this sentence:
"If there are multiple applications of the same type (e.g. several web browsers), only one of them needs to satisfy the requirements."

Their worry is that with this approach it is problematic to have a primary application for the majority of use cases, and then a secondary application for other use cases/different users, because if the secondary app works fine, the release will not be stopped even in case of serious issues in the primary app. Another potential problem is when another application is pulled into the distribution e.g. by a dependency, and even when it is not seen as a big issue, it can still make the original app be completely ignored in terms of release blocking. We might have found a way to avoid this by changing the rule this way:

"""
If there are multiple applications of the same type (e.g. several web browsers), the primary/default one must satisfy the requirements. If the primary/default application can't be determined, only one of said applications must satisfy the requirements.

Note: Determining primary applications
The usual way to determine a primary/default application is to look into system configuration where default applications are set (e.g. gnome-control-center -> Default Applications), or to launch the default application on an appropriate file type (e.g. double click on an .odt file in a file browser), or to look into a favorites menu section (e.g. KDE menu -> Favorites).
"""

I think the change is reasonable and I adjust my proposal to include it. If you don't like it, or like it, or think it should be changed somehow, please comment. Thanks!