Re: State of the project... WAS: Re: FOSDEM2004 and KDE/Debian ...

Alexander Neundorf <[email protected]> wrote:
> > And say what, seriously? "We started to do stuff but then argued about a
> > name for 4 weeks so everyone got bored and did other stuff instead."?
> > Don't get me wrong, Kapture and Kalternatives (I haven't forgotten you,
> > Juanjux, I've just been way too busy) are great, right, but it's nothing
> > with which to advertise a major project.
> 
> I think that's not completely wrong.

Basically Daniel's assessment is belittling all the actual work being
done and focussing on the negatives.  This will not do, and I might
point out aren't good qualities in a leader either -- if you can't
think of anything to say than I think it's more due to a lack of
imagination than anything else.  :)

> Main point: we (KDE) need more developers/contributors.

I'm partly at fault for dropping out so early in the game but at this
point my thesis is high priority and I have no choice but to drop
other time-consuming activities.

What would be useful, would be for someone (like yourself) to take the
active lead in each sub-project, and rally the people who signed up
for that particular project by approaching them individually (see the
paper).

We have a lot of potential to tap here, including offers of money
whenever needed.

> With the few guys around here, we can't build an enterprise distribution.
> UserLinux has more people (ok, not sure about this), and it has a big name 
> (Bruce).
> -take what UserLinux produces and modify it (i.e. default to an 
> optimized KDE 
> installation and offer Gnome too): not much there yet

We don't need to tackle the impossible of course.  Short term, in my
opinion, we should aim to get our enhancements back into Debian itself
so that everyone automatically benefits.

Daniel, I seem to get the impression *you* are interested in this
business of basing a distribution around Debian/UserLinux by
customizing package lists, etc?  How about it?  You don't need
anyone's consent to start doing the work.  As long as you are the one
doing it you decide.  Of course when you get volunteers and people
interested, hopefully you will show flexibility. :)

> -build a KDE-demo cd for demonstrating the full capabilities of KDE, 
> everything working and setup as good as possible: is being worked on

Indeed!

> -produce system level tools, probably focussing on *one specific x86 distro*. 
> Everything else is not realistic. This one has been chosen to be Debian.
> Work is being done on kalternatives, kapture.

Don't forget KDebConf which partly solves the system tools problem by
providing a GUI to any of Debian's existing system tools.

> -work on better integration of non-KDE apps: 
> kde-OOo: I guess no new developers have joined over there
> the gtk Qt theme: not much news
> libqtgtk: not much news

I think Philippe/Ralf/Zack are working on organizing all this.

> fuse-kio: works, but I get almost no responses

Organized information on fuse-kio would help a lot to garner interest,
along with a proper release and announcement on the dot.  What do you
think?

> Qt#: last update april 2003....

Where did you get Qt# from?  As far as I know, this is a dead project.

> All the mentioned points are IMHO not very "enterprisy". The
> enterprise stuff

I disagree, all of the above comes into play.

<snip a lot of good ideas...>

Organization and clarity of focus will help a lot.  This is why I was
looking for a volunteer to update the UserLinux/KDE paper and make it
more generic.  Any takers?

Cheers,
Navin.