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
Hi, Kevin On Qui, 2015-10-29 at 17:00 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
- 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.
Apart of Firefox (IMO we don't have choice, we have zero browsers based on QT and Firefox is the browser, final point), I agree , it is clearly a no-go since F22 but we have other examples like brtfs , python 3 , wayland , that have been projected to be a default and after 6 releases it wasn't , KDE5 is the same thing , after a year is not stable as we expect , but KDE5 overwrite KDE4 , so we can't have both at same time . So maybe it time go back and put KDE4 as default and KDE5 out or in copr. We just need rebuild kde-workspace, kdeplasma-addons, kde-print-manager and kde-baseapps. Unfortunately KDE upstream is not a big company and development is slower than we would like , but is clearly upstream fault , release KDE5 as stable when it wasn't.
Best regards,
Man, that sucks. KDE is the only GUI I use. Unity in Ubuntu sucks and GNOME in general sucks. I can't imagine Linux life without KDE. The fedora dens need to stop being fucking idiots and realize KDE is a big part of their user base.
On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 12:42 PM, Sérgio Basto sergio@serjux.com wrote:
Hi, Kevin On Qui, 2015-10-29 at 17:00 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
- 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.
Apart of Firefox (IMO we don't have choice, we have zero browsers based on QT and Firefox is the browser, final point), I agree , it is clearly a no-go since F22 but we have other examples like brtfs , python 3 , wayland , that have been projected to be a default and after 6 releases it wasn't , KDE5 is the same thing , after a year is not stable as we expect , but KDE5 overwrite KDE4 , so we can't have both at same time . So maybe it time go back and put KDE4 as default and KDE5 out or in copr. We just need rebuild kde-workspace, kdeplasma-addons, kde-print-manager and kde-baseapps. Unfortunately KDE upstream is not a big company and development is slower than we would like , but is clearly upstream fault , release KDE5 as stable when it wasn't.
Best regards,
Sérgio M. B.
kde mailing list kde@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/kde New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
Mark Haney composed on 2015-10-29 12:52 (UTC-0400):
Man, that sucks. KDE is the only GUI I use. Unity in Ubuntu sucks and GNOME in general sucks. I can't imagine Linux life without KDE. The fedora dens need to stop being fucking idiots and realize KDE is a big part of their user base.
KDE3 was and is everything I need from a DE. KDE4 added nothing I can't live without, and subtracted things hard to live without. KF5 so far has only made things worse, and I expect cutback of Kevin's contribution will severely exacerbate the KF5 situation for Fedora users. Meanwhile, KDE3 lives on in openSUSE as KDE3, and as TDE, available for major distros, including Fedora. https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/FedoraInstall
Kevin Kofler wrote:
Hi,
in recent times, I have been increasingly unable and unwilling to...
...
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.
Much great fun indeed.
Thank you very much for your contributions to the kde-sig over the years.
-- Rex
On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 2:00 PM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
- 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.
I believe it's quite obvious that Redhat considers GNOME a strategic component... KDE, not so much. If you want some interesting metrics, look here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-GTK-3.18-Stats
Gerald B. Cox wrote:
I believe it's quite obvious that Redhat considers GNOME a strategic component... KDE, not so much. If you want some interesting metrics, look here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-GTK-3.18-Stats
I didn't actually find any of these statistics very interesting.
The main statistic I would like to see is: what percentage of Fedora users are opting for KDE over Gnome? Fedora seems to me to be making it harder and harder to choose KDE (and other alternatives to Gnome).
On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Timothy Murphy gayleard@eircom.net wrote:
Gerald B. Cox wrote:
I believe it's quite obvious that Redhat considers GNOME a strategic component... KDE, not so much. If you want some interesting metrics,
look
here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-GTK-3.18-Stats
I didn't actually find any of these statistics very interesting.
The main statistic I would like to see is: what percentage of Fedora users are opting for KDE over Gnome? Fedora seems to me to be making it harder and harder to choose KDE (and other alternatives to Gnome).
I believe the numbers explain the role of KDE in Fedora. It's not strategic to the Redhat direction. Nothing malicious... just a business decision.
Timothy Murphy composed on 2015-10-30 13:38 (UTC):
The main statistic I would like to see is: what percentage of Fedora users are opting for KDE over Gnome? Fedora seems to me to be making it harder and harder to choose KDE (and other alternatives to Gnome).
I don't believe it's Fedora per se, but rather Gnome's demands from the support infrastructure.
On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 2:14 PM, Felix Miata mrmazda@earthlink.net wrote:
The main statistic I would like to see is: what percentage of Fedora
users
are opting for KDE over Gnome? Fedora seems to me to be making it harder and harder to choose KDE (and other alternatives to Gnome).
I don't believe it's Fedora per se, but rather Gnome's demands from the support infrastructure.
Well, if you look at the earlier metrics, Redhat is far and above the biggest contributor to GTK... supplying over 3/4's of the contribution. If anyone is driving, it is Redhat - which has a big influence on what happens with Fedora. Again, I don't think they are trying to purposely make things more difficult for anybody... its just not on their radar - and it won't be unless their major customers demand a change; and considering the main focus is on servers, that is highly unlikely.
On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 01:38:45PM +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
The main statistic I would like to see is: what percentage of Fedora users are opting for KDE over Gnome?
From our best analysis of Fedora 22 downloads, it's about:
68% Fedora Workstation (which is of course GNOME based) 14% Fedora Server (no GUI) 5% KDE Spin 4% Fedora Cloud (no GUI) 2.5% XFCE Spin 2.5% LXDE Spin 2% Mate Spin 1% Sugar <1% Everything else
The KDE percentage was roughly the same in Fedora 20, before the "3 Editions" marketing focus. It was higher — about 7% — for F19, but the difference doesn't seem to have come from the GNOME-based desktop, which hovers around that 70% mark. Also note that from mirror connection statistics, F20 and newer seem to be much bigger successes than anything since Fedora 14, so that 5% is a chunk of a larger pie.
Of course, these numbers are based on downloads and mirror connections. They don't really tell what people are actually _using_ once they've done the downloads.
Fedora seems to me to be making it harder and harder to choose KDE (and other alternatives to Gnome).
I don't think that's true. The Fedora design and websites team recently put a lot of effort into redoing https://spins.fedoraproject.org/, which puts KDE right at the top. A specific goal was to separate out the high-quality desktop spins from the more esoteric "software bundle" spins like Robotics or Fedora Jam — great in their own right, but kind of unfair to the desktops to have them all mixed in the list. (You can now find those at http://labs.fedoraproject.org/).
The problem with this is that, with the new 'Editions' seems to push everyone into the 'Workstation' version. Having fedup using the -nonproduct option (I think that's the option name) appears to the end user that RH/Fedora recommends going with the Gnome 'Workstation' version. I know I've thought that, and I'm an experienced Fedora Core/Fedora user since day 1.
To me, and I may not be indicative of the normal user base, that seems an awful like what Canonical has/is doing with Unity Desktop. Kubuntu and various other versions aren't getting the support from Canonical they used to. Does this simplify management, I'm sure it does. But you alienate those who want the choice of DE whether it's a deliberate, conscious choice or not. I don't like being forced to choose between a DE I don't like or a DE I do like, but get (potentially) lesser support and maintenance.
For most of us, it looks like this started as a concerted effort by RH/Fedora with the whole 'spins' nomenclature. And this appears to be one more step on the road to only one supported DE going forward. Sure, I can build my own distro (and have with Gentoo), but that's a time-consuming process and one I don't feel like I should be required to do just to get the DE I want. Most of us left the Windows/Mac world back in the day because we had choice with Distributions, platforms, etc. And to see this (apparently) deliberate GUI convergence puts a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
Of course, I'm probably not representative of the average user, so take that with a grain of salt.
On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 2:01 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 01:38:45PM +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
The main statistic I would like to see is: what percentage of Fedora
users
are opting for KDE over Gnome?
From our best analysis of Fedora 22 downloads, it's about:
68% Fedora Workstation (which is of course GNOME based) 14% Fedora Server (no GUI) 5% KDE Spin 4% Fedora Cloud (no GUI) 2.5% XFCE Spin 2.5% LXDE Spin 2% Mate Spin 1% Sugar <1% Everything else
The KDE percentage was roughly the same in Fedora 20, before the "3 Editions" marketing focus. It was higher — about 7% — for F19, but the difference doesn't seem to have come from the GNOME-based desktop, which hovers around that 70% mark. Also note that from mirror connection statistics, F20 and newer seem to be much bigger successes than anything since Fedora 14, so that 5% is a chunk of a larger pie.
Of course, these numbers are based on downloads and mirror connections. They don't really tell what people are actually _using_ once they've done the downloads.
Fedora seems to me to be making it harder and harder to choose KDE (and other alternatives to Gnome).
I don't think that's true. The Fedora design and websites team recently put a lot of effort into redoing https://spins.fedoraproject.org/, which puts KDE right at the top. A specific goal was to separate out the high-quality desktop spins from the more esoteric "software bundle" spins like Robotics or Fedora Jam — great in their own right, but kind of unfair to the desktops to have them all mixed in the list. (You can now find those at http://labs.fedoraproject.org/).
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ kde mailing list kde@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/kde New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 02:59:22PM -0400, Mark Haney wrote:
Of course, I'm probably not representative of the average user, so take that with a grain of salt.
Yeah, I think that's actually exactly the right grain of salt. People who want to choose their own Linux desktop environment are a small, small fraction of the possible audience for Fedora, and I think we actually serve that pretty well with the awesome spins that we _do_ have. This is _why_ http://getfedora.org is a separate site of its own — it's meant as a brochure site for a certain audience. If you want something different, you're in a different audence, and we have different places for that.
Mark Haney wrote:
The problem with this is that, with the new 'Editions' seems to push everyone into the 'Workstation' version. Having fedup using the -nonproduct option (I think that's the option name) appears to the end user that RH/Fedora recommends going with the Gnome 'Workstation' version. I know I've thought that, and I'm an experienced Fedora Core/Fedora user since day 1.
There are also repeatedly people coming into the #fedora-kde chan complaining about how they installed "Fedora Workstation" and were dismayed that it did not include KDE Plasma (or even that KDE Plasma was not the default!). The fact that Workstation is GNOME is not clearly communicated in many places, and even if they read it, users also do not realize how unfamiliar GNOME 3 looks and feels until they install and try it.
Thus, if the users were fully informed, the number of Workstation downloads would be much lower. I also fear that hiding the other spins is only leading to those users (who are disappointed by GNOME 3 after downloading Fedora Workstation) outright switching to another distribution rather than another spin. They will still show up in the download statistics (for Workstation), but they will NOT be Fedora (nor GNOME) users.
Kevin Kofler
---- On Fri, 30 Oct 2015 23:31:20 +0530 Matthew Miller <mattdm@fedoraproject.org> wrote ---- > Fedora seems to me to be making it harder and harder to choose KDE > (and other alternatives to Gnome).
I don't think that's true. The Fedora design and websites team recently put a lot of effort into redoing https://spins.fedoraproject.org/, which puts KDE right at the top. A specific goal was to separate out the high-quality desktop spins from the more esoteric "software bundle" spins like Robotics or Fedora Jam — great in their own right, but kind of unfair to the desktops to have them all mixed in the list. (You can now find those at http://labs.fedoraproject.org/).
What he means is that its not available directly on https://getfedora.org/? New users are discouraged to explore other established desktop environments such as Plasma which are immensely popular at schools and workplaces and they may find familiar to use.
Regards, Sudhir Khanger, sudhirkhanger.com.
On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 12:30:51AM +0530, Sudhir Khanger wrote:
What he means is that its not available directly on https://getfedora.org/?
Yes, although do note the upcoming design at https://stg.getfedora.org/, which makes the link to the new http://labs.fedoraproject.org site more prominent and includes KDE and other icons.
New users are discouraged to explore otherestablished desktop environments such as Plasma which are immensely popular at schools and workplaces and they may find familiar to use.
I don't think "are discouraged" is quite fair. Instead, we didn't want to bewilder and overwhelm users with a choose-your-own-adventure presentation of Fedora. And, again, this strategy seems to be working — we _are_ getting more Fedora users after a long downturn.
If people working on the KDE spin feel like showcasing this flavor in schools and workplaces helps growth, _awesome_. Please do that! I really like that Fedora has all of these different options under one umbrella, rather than making everything other than the main focus be the equivalent of Remixes — their own projects with mostly their own infrastructure. But, on the other hand, presenting Fedora as a whole bunch of components which you get to assemble just wasn't working to help us grow.
Matthew Miller wrote:
Yes, although do note the upcoming design at https://stg.getfedora.org/, which makes the link to the new http://labs.fedoraproject.org site more prominent and includes KDE and other icons.
But why are they grayed out? :-( The desktop icons would be much more recognizable if the upstream color code were followed. In addition, the grayed-out appearance might mislead users into believing that the spin is not available for some reason.
Kevin Kofler
On 10/30/2015 02:42 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Matthew Miller wrote:
Yes, although do note the upcoming design at https://stg.getfedora.org/, which makes the link to the new http://labs.fedoraproject.org site more prominent and includes KDE and other icons.
But why are they grayed out? :-( The desktop icons would be much more recognizable if the upstream color code were followed. In addition, the grayed-out appearance might mislead users into believing that the spin is not available for some reason.
Kevin Kofler
Yeah, that is weird. I would also have them directly under the top three and above the Freedom/Friends/.. section. Is there some more appropriate space to comment on this design?
On Friday 30 Oct 2015 3:56:07 PM Orion Poplawski wrote:
Is there some more appropriate space to comment on this design?
Design mailing list[1] and often design team members seek feedback on their blogs which can be seen on Fedora Planet.
[1] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
Orion Poplawski wrote:
Yeah, that is weird. I would also have them directly under the top three and above the Freedom/Friends/.. section. Is there some more appropriate space to comment on this design?
and Glenn Holmer wrote:
In my opinion, the "freedom/friends/features/first" section should be moved below the "Want more Fedora options?" section. Show the options first and then remind people that after all, some of your best friends are KDE, XFCE... users.
I filed: https://fedorahosted.org/design-team/ticket/412
Kevin Kofler
I wrote:
But why are they grayed out? :-( The desktop icons would be much more recognizable if the upstream color code were followed. In addition, the grayed-out appearance might mislead users into believing that the spin is not available for some reason.
I filed: https://fedorahosted.org/design-team/ticket/411
Kevin Kofler
On 30/10/15 07:39 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 12:30:51AM +0530, Sudhir Khanger wrote:
What he means is that its not available directly on https://getfedora.org/?
Yes, although do note the upcoming design at https://stg.getfedora.org/, which makes the link to the new http://labs.fedoraproject.org site more prominent and includes KDE and other icons.
Hmmm... Open the new/staging page https://stg.getfedora.org/, Ctrl+F, type "KDE" as search string... Nothing.
That is either very poor search optimization design or... deliberate? I'd like to believe it's the first one but am not so sure - is it? If it is, it should be easy to fix. Proof will be in the pudding. err... when the page goes live, that is.
Dariusz
On 31/10/15 10:27 AM, Dariusz J. Garbowski wrote:
On 30/10/15 07:39 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 12:30:51AM +0530, Sudhir Khanger wrote:
What he means is that its not available directly on https://getfedora.org/?
Yes, although do note the upcoming design at https://stg.getfedora.org/, which makes the link to the new http://labs.fedoraproject.org site more prominent and includes KDE and other icons.
Hmmm... Open the new/staging page https://stg.getfedora.org/, Ctrl+F, type "KDE" as search string... Nothing.
Ticket opened: https://fedorahosted.org/design-team/ticket/410
On 10/31/2015 05:27 AM, Dariusz J. Garbowski wrote:
On 30/10/15 07:39 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 12:30:51AM +0530, Sudhir Khanger wrote:
What he means is that its not available directly on https://getfedora.org/?
Yes, although do note the upcoming design at https://stg.getfedora.org/, which makes the link to the new http://labs.fedoraproject.org site more prominent and includes KDE and other icons.
Hmmm... Open the new/staging page https://stg.getfedora.org/, Ctrl+F, type "KDE" as search string... Nothing.
In my opinion, the "freedom/friends/features/first" section should be moved below the "Want more Fedora options?" section. Show the options first and then remind people that after all, some of your best friends are KDE, XFCE... users.
On 30 October 2015 at 18:01, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Of course, these numbers are based on downloads and mirror connections. They don't really tell what people are actually _using_ once they've done the downloads.
Indeed. I have never installed the KDE Spin. I install the Workstation "product" (hate that name) and add the KDE Group. I use Evolution for mail (except today :-) so I need some of the Gnome stuff anyway. I still regard myself as a KDE user.
poc
Patrick O'Callaghan composed on 2015-10-30 19:26 (UTC):
Matthew Miller wrote:
Of course, these numbers are based on downloads and mirror connections. They don't really tell what people are actually _using_ once they've done the downloads.
Indeed. I have never installed the KDE Spin. I install the Workstation "product" (hate that name) and add the KDE Group. I use Evolution for mail (except today :-) so I need some of the Gnome stuff anyway. I still regard myself as a KDE user.
On all my own machines, I install whatever Anaconda presents as the most minimal of bootable and networkable options, then add bits until I have working minimal KDE, then add whatever apps I actually need. It's infrequent that I install fresh, as I find live upgrading with yum/dnf less painful than installation. When practical, I clone another installation rather than installing.
Am 30.10.2015 um 19:01 schrieb Matthew Miller:
On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 01:38:45PM +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
The main statistic I would like to see is: what percentage of Fedora users are opting for KDE over Gnome?
From our best analysis of Fedora 22 downloads, it's about:
68% Fedora Workstation (which is of course GNOME based) 14% Fedora Server (no GUI) 5% KDE Spin 4% Fedora Cloud (no GUI) 2.5% XFCE Spin 2.5% LXDE Spin 2% Mate Spin 1% Sugar <1% Everything else
The KDE percentage was roughly the same in Fedora 20
all that numbers don't say anything about users
i never ever started a setup with the KDE spin but installed from the full DVD, removed GNOME stuff and installed KDE, well that was many years ago and since then i did not reinstall from scratch
on the other hand i have running a torrent server to help distribute Fedora, all spins, non of that downloads mean that i ever used GNOME while i know both, GNOME and KDE from version 1.0 in the 1990's
On 10/29/2015 10:00 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Hi,
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
Thank you for your time and effort.
On Thursday 29 October 2015 13:39:53 Orion Poplawski wrote:
On 10/29/2015 10:00 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Hi,
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 KoflerThank you for your time and effort.
Indeed.
On 29/10/15 04:00 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
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.
Kevin,
Thank you for your contributions to Fedora and KDE over the years. Very much appreciated.
Regards, Dariusz
On 30/10/15 03:00, Kevin Kofler wrote:
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.
Hi Kevin,
It is often a thankless task volunteering on open source projects, so thank you for all your efforts over the years. No doubt KDE on Fedora would not be where it is even now if it were not for your contributions. Take care and all the best.
Cheers, Chris
Thanks for your time, i came from Kubuntu to Fedora 22 and i found it so great that i decided to stay here.
Plasma 5.4 is in great shape for my personal needs and i haven't had any issues with my daily use(i am an CS student and F22 KDE offers me a very reliable development distro).
I still would like to help more, but i am not so skilled. That's why i focus in testing.
Just a question, why not using OpenSUSE Build Service when possible ? Maybe they can give you a hand and the maintenance of those 400+ packages would been so hard.
Thanks again for your time, i hope F23 KDE to be as good as F22 was.
Hernán El oct. 29, 2015 11:22 PM, "Chris Smart" mail@christophersmart.com escribió:
On 30/10/15 03:00, Kevin Kofler wrote:
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.
Hi Kevin,
It is often a thankless task volunteering on open source projects, so thank you for all your efforts over the years. No doubt KDE on Fedora would not be where it is even now if it were not for your contributions. Take care and all the best.
Cheers, Chris
-- _ °v° /(_)\ ^ ^ _______________________________________________ kde mailing list kde@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/kde New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
Hernán Ramírez wrote:
Just a question, why not using OpenSUSE Build Service when possible ?
Because "when possible" is effectively never.
Official Fedora packages cannot be build in OBS, and even for third-party packages, Copr just works better with Fedora. In particular, the Fedora targets in OBS do not include updates and are thus effectively useless. (OpenSUSE has a strict ban on soname bumps in updates. Fedora does not.)
Kevin Kofler
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@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
kde mailing list kde@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/kde New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
Btw. I still think Plasma 5 is the best "KDE" version ever (with small glitches). No flame, I enjoy using it.
As a matter of interest, why do find it better than Plasma 4 ? I am running KDE-5 under Fedora-23beta, and it finally seems to me to have got over the initial disabling freezes and other bugs, and to be quite usable.
However, I don't see any real difference from Plasma 4, certainly nothing worth dying for.
Incidentally, I felt exactly the same about KDE-4 over KDE-3.
I must have some visual impairment, since I just don't see these wonderful improvements that others praise so highly.
Timothy Murphy composed on 2015-10-30 13:50 (UTC):
Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
Btw. I still think Plasma 5 is the best "KDE" version ever (with small glitches). No flame, I enjoy using it.
As a matter of interest, why do find it better than Plasma 4 ? I am running KDE-5 under Fedora-23beta, and it finally seems to me to have got over the initial disabling freezes and other bugs, and to be quite usable.
However, I don't see any real difference from Plasma 4, certainly nothing worth dying for.
Incidentally, I felt exactly the same about KDE-4 over KDE-3.
I must have some visual impairment, since I just don't see these wonderful improvements that others praise so highly.
I don't think there are any intentional improvements from user perspective, only from developer perspective, since the timings from v3->v4 and v4-v5 seem based purely on QT changing v3->v4 and v4->v5. From where I sit, feature loss has overpowered feature gain with each major KDE version change, even as maturing progressed/progresses.
---- On Fri, 30 Oct 2015 21:52:15 +0530 Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> wrote ----
I don't think there are any intentional improvements from user perspective, only from developer perspective, since the timings from v3->v4 and v4-v5 seem based purely on QT changing v3->v4 and v4->v5. From where I sit, feature loss has overpowered feature gain with each major KDE version change, even as maturing progressed/progresses.
It depends on how you look at it.
The whole new flexible design approach was much needed. We have a far greater consistency in the UI then we had in KDE4. Plasma for me is mostly the panel, App Dash, and actual apps. I am very happy with the status bar, widgets, notifications, etc. What will happen to the apps is yet to be seen? I have not seen any "use-facing" improvements in Kontact, which I use religiously, is certainly concerning. Folks don't like to install KDE apps on non-KDE environments because it pulls 100s of deps. I would like to see some statistics if that problem has been resolved with the framework thing.
I wasn't a KDE user when it made transition from v2 to v3 to v4. I don't hear good things about it. v4 to v5 transition where all widgets are made obsolete is not the best thing to do to the KDE ecosystem. I hope we don't continue to obsolete everything every time there is a major version upgrade.
Regards, Sudhir Khanger, sudhirkhanger.com.
Sudhir Khanger wrote:
Folks don't like to install KDE apps on non-KDE environments because it pulls 100s of deps. I would like to see some statistics if that problem has been resolved with the framework thing.
The NUMBER of dependencies has actually INCREASED with Frameworks, due to the splits. The SIZE may or may not have decreased. It depends on the application. Sadly, most nontrivial applications end up dragging in almost anything anyway, so I am not convinced that the splits were worth the extra pain for packagers (packaging so many packages, tracking the dependencies) and the occasional feature loss or code duplication that the layering approach required.
Kevin Kofler
Hi Kevin, we have already spoken to each other yesterday, but I would like to publicly thank you for all your work
On 29 October 2015 at 16:00, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Hi,
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.
As a user of KDE on Fedora, thanks for all the time you've put into it.
On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 10:24 AM, Ian Malone ibmalone@gmail.com wrote:
On 29 October 2015 at 16:00, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Hi,
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.
As a user of KDE on Fedora, thanks for all the time you've put into it.
-- imalone http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk _______________________________________________ kde mailing list kde@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/kde New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
Thanks for all your time and efforts. Some people sometimes not understand why we do that for "free".
[]'s Helio
Kevin Kofler wrote:
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.
Dear Kevin,
I was very sorry to read of your resignation. You are one of a handful of people who I have found endlessly helpful with my semi-ignorant queries, and those of others like me.
I have often wondered how you managed to find time to deal with the vast array of KDE applications you seemed to make your own.
In my view, KDE has become seriously over-complicated, partly because of the dogma that everything under the sun must have a KDE version.
I also share your view that Fedora should treat KDE and Gnome on an equal footing, and let Fedora users decide which they prefer.
I think we're all in agreement that Fedora (and other distros) should treat Gnome and KDE the same and let the users decide. I don't completely agree that KDE is over-complicated due to dogma. I, like a lot of people I know, don't want to install a crap-ton of GTK+ packages to run Gnome Apps anymore than Gnome users don't want to install a ton of KDE libraries to run KDE apps. Personally, I've found the KDE apps to be more stable and more user-friendly. Gnome does nothing but change for the sake of change, not for any sort of 'evolutionary' reason. That's a dogma I can't stand. Gnome is not friendly enough for new linux users, nor for those who come from the Windows world (like my parents). Not to mention, several of the Gnome maintainers are rude, patronising gits who think they know what's best for us. If I wanted that attitude, I'd have stuck with Apple or Microsoft.
On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 9:32 AM, Timothy Murphy gayleard@eircom.net wrote:
Kevin Kofler wrote:
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.
Dear Kevin,
I was very sorry to read of your resignation. You are one of a handful of people who I have found endlessly helpful with my semi-ignorant queries, and those of others like me.
I have often wondered how you managed to find time to deal with the vast array of KDE applications you seemed to make your own.
In my view, KDE has become seriously over-complicated, partly because of the dogma that everything under the sun must have a KDE version.
I also share your view that Fedora should treat KDE and Gnome on an equal footing, and let Fedora users decide which they prefer.
-- Timothy Murphy gayleard /at/ eircom.net School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin
kde mailing list kde@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/kde New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
On 30 October 2015 at 13:40, Mark Haney mark.haney@vifprogram.com wrote:
I think we're all in agreement that Fedora (and other distros) should treat Gnome and KDE the same and let the users decide. I don't completely agree that KDE is over-complicated due to dogma. I, like a lot of people I know, don't want to install a crap-ton of GTK+ packages to run Gnome Apps anymore than Gnome users don't want to install a ton of KDE libraries to run KDE apps. Personally, I've found the KDE apps to be more stable and more user-friendly. Gnome does nothing but change for the sake of change, not for any sort of 'evolutionary' reason. That's a dogma I can't stand. Gnome is not friendly enough for new linux users, nor for those who come from the Windows world (like my parents). Not to mention, several of the Gnome maintainers are rude, patronising gits who think they know what's best for us. If I wanted that attitude, I'd have stuck with Apple or Microsoft.
No no no, you've just failed to understand the genius of their design, which is proof itself that you don't know what you're talking about.
;) just in case it's needed...
(Though FWIW I don't have much problem with mixing best of breed apps if it means picking up a few dependencies, software is only a small fraction of the total data I keep. This thing desktops environments develop where they want to proliferate into an exclusive 'ecosystem' isn't much in the interests of users. I happily used K3B for years under Gnome before I switched to KDE.)
On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 10:11 AM, Ian Malone ibmalone@gmail.com wrote:
On 30 October 2015 at 13:40, Mark Haney mark.haney@vifprogram.com wrote:
No no no, you've just failed to understand the genius of their design, which is proof itself that you don't know what you're talking about.
;) just in case it's needed...
No, I caught the sarcasm from the beginning. And it's almost like you wrote their Mission Statement for them.
(Though FWIW I don't have much problem with mixing best of breed apps if it means picking up a few dependencies, software is only a small fraction of the total data I keep. This thing desktops environments develop where they want to proliferate into an exclusive 'ecosystem' isn't much in the interests of users. I happily used K3B for years under Gnome before I switched to KDE.)
You're right, it's not a huge amount of data for the dependencies. I just have this thing about Gnome apps in general. They never seem quite as good as the KDE versions. Though, the maintainers attitude also makes a big difference to me. I don't use apps from people who act like that. (If that makes sense.)
Mark Haney wrote:
You're right, it's not a huge amount of data for the dependencies. I just have this thing about Gnome apps in general. They never seem quite as good as the KDE versions. Though, the maintainers attitude also makes a big difference to me. I don't use apps from people who act like that. (If that makes sense.)
There are two main issues that make me avoid GNOME/GTK+ applications whenever possible: 1. The official GNOME applications and even some GTK+ ones share the same "no features, no options" design that is making the GNOME desktop unusable. 2. GTK+ is getting worse and worse at integration into non-GNOME desktops with every release: * They regressed theming support (no more support for theme engines, only SVG). * They redesigned the dialogs to look like crap without client-side window decorations (and unlike Qt, GTK+ still does not support using native dialogs). * They use nonstandard "*-symbolic" icons which look ugly with any non-monochromatic theme (e.g. with Oxygen – it's less drastic with Breeze, but you still won't get the native Breeze icon even where it exists; they also deliberately exempted *-symbolic from the standard freedesktop.org fallback rules that state that foo-symbolic should fall back to foo BEFORE falling back to another theme, forcing their theming choices on the user instead). * They redefined how clicks into the scrollbar are handled (making it inconsistent with native applications). * They no longer honor device DPI by default. etc.
Kevin Kofler
Kevin Kofler composed on 2015-10-30 16:21 (UTC+0100):
...Gnome/GTK+...
- They no longer honor device DPI by default.
I think that happened around 9 years ago, joined at least by Enlightenment, and probably all the forks from Gnome too, not to mention the viewports of all web browsers not based on KHTML[1]. :-p
[1] Geckos do retain proprietary support for display density. Check out http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/dpi-screen-window.html for more info.
Felix Miata wrote:
Kevin Kofler composed on 2015-10-30 16:21 (UTC+0100):
...Gnome/GTK+...
- They no longer honor device DPI by default.
I think that happened around 9 years ago, joined at least by Enlightenment, and probably all the forks from Gnome too, not to mention the viewports of all web browsers not based on KHTML[1]. :-p
The desktop-level default in GNOME changed 9 years ago. The toolkit-level default in GTK+ (i.e., what GTK+ does if the XSetting for the DPI is not set) changed only a few weeks ago. It is not the same thing. (I am complaining here about GTK+/GNOME APPLICATIONS, not about the GNOME desktop!) This means that if you have KDE set to honor the hardware DPI, and thus xsettings-kde will not export any DPI XSetting, GTK+ will no longer honor your preference. (The GTK+ developers refuse to fix it, claiming xsettings-kde was relying on "undocumented behavior".)
Kevin Kofler
On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 05:00:39PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
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.
Hi Kevin. Thanks for your many years of hard work on this.
On Oct 29, 2015 7:01 PM, "Kevin Kofler" kevin.kofler@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
Thank you very much for all your contributions, we appreciate the time and effort you put in Fedora KDE, wish you all the best.
Regards Mustafa Muhammad
kde mailing list kde@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/kde New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
...
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.
Thanks to you (and Rex and others) for all the hard work that you've been doing over the years!
KDE has been my DE of choice on Fedora for rougly that time frame - incidentally until yesterday, when the combined hassle of "crash on external output changes" and "mysterious login times" finally made me jump the KDE ship (for i3) in a term where I simply need stability for professionial presentations.
Despite upstream being what it is - the Fedora KDE Spin and SIG where always at their best!
Cheers Michael
Maybe slightly OT on this thread, but what is this i3 that you mention?
On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 8:06 AM, Michael J Gruber < michaeljgruber+gmane@fastmail.fm> wrote:
...
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.
Thanks to you (and Rex and others) for all the hard work that you've been doing over the years!
KDE has been my DE of choice on Fedora for rougly that time frame - incidentally until yesterday, when the combined hassle of "crash on external output changes" and "mysterious login times" finally made me jump the KDE ship (for i3) in a term where I simply need stability for professionial presentations.
Despite upstream being what it is - the Fedora KDE Spin and SIG where always at their best!
Cheers Michael
kde mailing list kde@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/kde New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
On Tuesday 03 Nov 2015 8:16:42 AM Mark Haney wrote:
what is this i3 that you mention?
Sudhir Khanger wrote:
On Tuesday 03 Nov 2015 8:16:42 AM Mark Haney wrote:
what is this i3 that you mention?
Just tried on f23. Doesn't work.
Login hangs, with some message in red text about 'status_command missing library of something'
On Tuesday 03 Nov 2015 1:44:24 PM Neal Becker wrote:
Just tried on f23. Doesn't work.
Login hangs, with some message in red text about 'status_command missing library of something'
I wouldn't know. I had my fun with these things when I was an Arch Linux user.
This might be helpful https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1174678.
On Tuesday 03 Nov 2015 1:44:24 PM Neal Becker wrote:
Login hangs, with some message in red text about 'status_command missing library of something'
dnf install i3status
That should resolve the issue. You may as well want to add 'export TERMINAL=konsole' as i3 wasn't able to detect konsole as the default terminal which seems to be required to log out.
On 2015-10-29 10:00, Kevin Kofler 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.
cut
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
Having left something I devoted a great amount of time a few years ago, I understand some of your feelings.
I appreciate the work you have put into the project over the years and agree with some of your frustrations.
Hope your future endeavors find the dedication that you had with KDE. Good luck and enjoy the new found free time.
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@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/kde New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
On 10/29/2015 11:00 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
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
Kevin, it has indeed been fun. I'm truly sorry to see you go, but I fully understand and support your decision to do so.
Regards, Dan
-
Chris Smart -
Dan Mossor -
Dariusz J. Garbowski -
Eli Wapniarski -
Felix Miata -
Gerald B. Cox -
Germano Massullo -
Glenn Holmer -
Helio Chissini de Castro -
Hernán Ramírez -
Ian Malone -
Jaroslav Reznik -
Kevin Kofler -
Mark Haney -
Matthew Miller -
Michael J Gruber -
Mustafa Muhammad -
Neal Becker -
Orion Poplawski -
Patrick O'Callaghan -
Reindl Harald -
Rex Dieter -
Robin Laing -
Sudhir Khanger -
Sérgio Basto -
than -
Timothy Murphy