Hi all, I thought I'd share a braindump with you how I can imagine the coming year in Plasma. I'll outline the current state "a bit more detailed", and will offer ideas how we're scheduling the coming months up to a stable, brand-spanking new Plasma, as well as outlining work we have ahead of us.
Today, I'm running Plasma 2 almost exclusively on my laptop. The most important features are there, and it's definitely dogfoodable for me without huge impact on my productivity, and it's getting noticeably better by the day. That's quite a milestone, and I'd like to thank everybody for getting it this far. With Qt arriving at a stable 5.2, and us having ironed out quite some stability problems in the past weeks (hello switching QML engine and scene graph renderer in QtQuick/QtQml!), it now runs stable, I haven't seen a crasher during normal usage in a few days (but I know how to trigger one :P). Most of the infrastructure has been ported and made to work, but we're not quite there, yet. The move to sddm hasn't materialized yet (upstream presence has been a bit spotty, so we might need to take a more active role in making this happen). Other options are also still on the table, so this needs nailing down a strategy. The display manger topic bleeds into the startup procedure, and especially the splash handling, and of course the Wayland topic. The above is one example of architectural things we need to sort out. We have others, such as the startup (startkde) where we have a working port now, but I think we can do much better there. Options on the table are using systemd for it, start-active which could be up to the task, or possibly a hybrid solution. Also, can we make login really fast? :D We have some fallout in systemsettings, especially the Locale module needs more porting (porting away from KDE4Support & KLocale, using the new Qt APIs we've merged), and making all those little setting buttons everywhere work correctly. In plasma-shell, we have some construction sites as well. Kickoff still feels quite unfinished (some would say broken ;)), configuration of Plasmoids isn't complete in many cases, and it's not yet visually pleasant. There's good progress there, and I think Plasma 2 can look visually more stunning than Plasma 1 (I'm especially excited about Marco's translucency/contrast improvements, and the stronger accentuation of typography and cleaner and better aligned default look we're moving towards, getting styling of QtQuick Controls fully fixed will contribute to this as well). We're also missing a few things, such as KRunner, which isn't finished yet, and along with it a slew of runners (which should be relatively easy to port in the end, and we do pretty well in parallelized, small tasks, so that I guess won't be too much of a headache). plasma-framework needs some work on APIs, too. With large version number change, we can reduce the delta between libplasma and our declarative imports. There are some candidates which currently use quite some glue code for our declarative bindings. Can cook this down and maybe move some implementations into libplasma, or adding necessary Q_PROPERTYs to our API? The scriptengine has quite a large bunch of code as well. Does it make sense to move the plasmoid. object (offered to our Plasma/Applets) into libplasma, it's pretty much core of our current API, but otoh is currently fixed to QML. Wayland. Martin has focused on the Qt5 and XCB port, which is also preparatory for running kwin on Wayland. This is likely the major part of the graphics stack we need to care about, but there is a number of X11 calls in our further basic workspace stack that we need to sort out in order to provide a full- fledged user experience in a post-X11 scenario. There's a slew of IPC things that might need API work on both sides, especially between plasma-shell and kwin. There's some serious work ahead, but I think the base is really good. I'm running kwin\5 extensively, and it works and performs well. We have a large amount of regressions, still. This can be larger things, like the above, but also all kinds of smaller regressions, which often stem from API changes in our scriptengine, that we need to catch and fix. In that regard, we've started shifting bugs into bugzilla, so we don't lose track of the whole slew of issues we see. In many cases, it's easy fixes, but probably about a thousand of them, so this needs tools and workflows. Is bugzilla good enough for us, do we want to invest time, switching costs and possible disappointment with other tools? How agile do we want to be? How formal should our processes be? Then, apart from the technical bits, there is the user point of view, which should become our guiding light. We've concentrated a lot on the technical bits, but haven't looked further into our vision towards the user, workflows we want to make as smooth as possible, UI concepts, integration of new things like KPeople, KDE Connect, and so on. That's quite natural, as revamping our architecture to work on top of the new, fully accelerated graphics stack was the base work we had to lay. The UI side is where we can really make a difference, we've built quite an awesome base, but we need to turn this into real, added value for our users. We're not very well equipped in the artwork department. Perhaps we can try to find artists more actively. I think we have some very exciting work to be done, with a large audience. There *must* be good designers around who want to help us making Plasma beautiful. So, our coming milestone is to prepare a tech preview for our users. This could be in the form of a set of tarballs. We also have the Neon5 image, which should be in pretty good shape. I'm personally also cool with not rolling tarballs, but offering git tags. Our packager audience, to my knowledge is quite fine with using git as source, and it should be cryptographically sound to offer them a git tag to pull from. (Packagers: please correct me if I'm wrong.) Bottom line: there's a mild amount of release management to do. Also some PR work is needed, a video, screenshots, a text explaining the status, direction, progress and plans. Something exciting for our users while they chew on the proven and stable long term maintenance release. :) Part of this communication is that we should settle the name question. We had a good discussion about that some time ago, but it died out before reaching a conclusion. Let's put the options back on the table, and come to a decision there. (Relevant thread is "naming the next major release" on 19th August on plasma-devel.) Following that, I think the following roadmap makes sense. (This is rough, and up for discussion, but I think a solid base to know what's coming.) Next week: tech preview of our current state, ready to try Early January: Tokamak 7, focusing on high-level view and how to realize that Q1/2013 Focus on Wayland, completing the workspace infrastructure, completing API reviews and changes, and looking into kdelibs improvements we want to get in before KF 5.0. (Hello, KNotifications, KService, etc.!) End of Q1: Solid beta, again something that shows visible progress and promise Q2: Polish, take a step back and fix bugs, make it work as smooth as possible, extra-mile and papercuts work, but still concentrate on the desktop basics and especially avoid regressions in primary workflow and functionality. This leads to a stable release of at least the desktop shell towards the end of Q2. Q3 and 4, I imagine, could shift the focus from the bare basics to a more complete product. Multi-device usecases realized by different shells, meaning porting and integrating the Plasma Active UI, Plasma Mediacenter, and making the whole device morphing scenario useful. Integration of PIM data via kpeople, telepathy, inter-device communication (KDE connect could play a major role here). There has been some very exciting stuff in the making, which is coming to fruition and ready to shine. Many of us will meet in January for Tokamak, that's a wonderful opportunity to nail down many of the higher and lower level issues. And Tokamaks are fun. To conclude this epic email, and perhaps provide a bit of balance: I am utterly impressed of where we stand right now. Just a few weeks ago, a smoothly running desktop seemed far, far away. Today, I'm running Plasma 2 on my laptop comfortably, with smoothly wobbling windows, but without being too afraid to lose this long email thanks to some major nasty crash. Chapeau to everyone who has contributed to us getting there! Let's turn this base into the most awesome workspace we can imagine! So, there's my braindump, thanks for bearing with me so far. What are your ideas? :) -- sebas http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org | GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
