Am 03.12.24 um 09:02 schrieb Ingo Klöcker:
On Dienstag, 3. Dezember 2024 01:17:41 Mitteleuropäische Normalzeit Justin
Zobel wrote:
I'm a bit frustrated by our new application development pipeline.
I see applications appear on apps.kde.org and in official namespaces on
GitLab before they have passed KDE Review.
In my opinion you are conflating two completely different things. Let's discuss
them separately.
Let's start with apps.kde.org.
I feel this is falsely advertising to the world that the app is ready
for use.
I agree that this could be improved. A possible solution would be to use the
brand-new lifecycle attribute in repo-metadata to clearly mark apps that
haven't passed KDE Review as beta. I don't think that hiding them from
apps.kde.org is a fair solution. On the contrary, I think having beta apps on
apps.kde.org could possibly attract the attention of other developers who'd be
interested in working on a new app and of beta users who'd be interested in
giving the app a try. The possibility to get early feedback is a key value of
FOSS. "Release early. Release often."
https://community.kde.org/Policies/Application_Lifecycle clearly documents
what differentiates playground projects from reviewed projects (although this
wiki page needs to be updated to mention the new lifecycle attribute instead
of the old projectpath attribute). I think it's just a matter of making this
information more visible to avoid wrong expectations.
I'd rephrase it around "Does it have a stable release?". If not then we
could show it under something like "Beta Applications".
That's a more user-relevant criterium than "Did it pass kdereview",
which is fairly internal and meaningless to most people.
Technically kdereview is a precondition for a stable release, so the end
result isn't much different. It would however prevent a situation where
the app is technically "reviewed" but there's still no installable release.
The button on apps.kde.org that says 'Install on Linux' takes me to
Discover and then tells me that the app was not found in any software
repositories.
Is "passing KDE Review" really connected in any way to "packaged by some
distro"? I guess that's a question only distro packagers can answer.
It also tells me to report this to my distribution which can lead to
noise on distro bug trackers. It can also lead to noise on the KDE bug
tracker because a user wants to install the application but can't.
Discover probably shouldn't do this for beta apps. I have no idea how the beta
state could be communicated to Discover. Is there something suitable in
AppStream? I didn't see something obvious; we could probably use tags. To
avoid duplicate information this should somehow be added automatically based
on the lifecyle attribute in repo-metadata.
Discover uses the distributions Appstream pool. If the app is not
packaged in the distro Appstream doesn't know about this. As far as I
can tell there is no good way for Discover to distinguish between "This
app you told me to open doesn't exist" and "it exists but isn't packaged
in this distribution".
Now GitLab namespaces
I think keeping applications in user namespaces until it has passed KDE
Review would solve both of these problems.
I think keeping applications in user namespaces until they have passed KDE
Review is an excellent way to hide them from potential co-contributors. Maybe
it's just me because I don't read blogs, follow people on any s.m. and don't
scour GitLab user namespaces for interesting projects, but I have never
stumbled accidentally over an interesting project hidden in a user namespace.
I 100% agree. This proposal would introduce tons of obstacles for
collaboration, and I don't see any benefit for it whatsoever.
Regards,
Ingo
Cheers
Nico
