Re: Continuing Community Issues

On 1 February 2011 05:18, Robert Marmorstein <[email protected]> wrote:
> Apologies in advance if this goes through more than once -- I've been
> having Kolab issues....
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I have refrained from posting here for awhile -- partly because of
> problems with Kolab and kdepim (I use latest trunk) and partly because
> I have been afraid that if people know I plan to continue contributing
> to koffice (or whatever "group A" will eventually be called), that I
> will be blackballed from also contributing to Calligra.
>
> After talking with Inge today, though, I realize that this was
> probably a mistake.  I don't want to open the whole can of worms up
> again, but I would like to request that developers in "Group B" be
> more circumspect in how they behave toward visitors to public koffice
> forums, especially the IRC channel and the mailing list.
>
> I believe that a lot of what bothers me stems from two issues:
>
> A.  Unresolved animosity between Thomas and the group B developers.
> B.  Misinformation or misunderstandings about Group A.
>
> In particular, I feel that many of you have assumed that "Group A" is
> really just Thomas.  That is simply not true.  I personally hope to
> contribute to both projects and there are one or two others who have
> also continued to contribute.
>
> It's also not true that we are working only on kword.  One of the
> things I have been working on (for some time, actually) involves
> improving GUI support for variables in several koffice applications.
>
> As far as I know, it is true that Group A has not formally decided who
> is maintaining what.  That is largely because we do not have any
> dedicated channel for communicating with just "Group A" right now and
> it is difficult to use the old channels when the old disputes keep
> recurring in them.

Hello Robert,
It's good to hear a word from you, and especially statement that you
plan to contribute.
That has already been mentioned: freenode offers literaly free
creation of new IRC channels.

> So, I guess what I am saying is that I would greatly appreciate it if
> developers would make an effort to avoid broad generalizations about
> who belongs to "Group A" on the IRC channel.  Directing users and new
> developers to Calligra is not what bothers me.  It is the implied
> message that Calligra is now the "only official koffice" that often
> accompanies it.  I have seen several IRC pots that give users the
> impression that development has entirely stopped in the Group A
> branch, which is untrue.

I am sitting at #koffice too, one reason is that people come here for
kexi help as well, so I feel I have all the rights.
Kexi (and thus parts of kofficelibs brought by Kexi), moved so 100% to
Calligra we also have all the rights to say: go to Calligra for
updates.
From my observation mostly nothing happens on #koffice in contract to
#calligra which from point of view of many users and developers is the
new place for _their_ activities, (we like it or not). So again,
creating free irc channel for group A would help both sides.

> Instead of saying things like "all the real developers have moved to
> Group B, try #calligra instead.",

This is not correct indeed, could you please openly mention who said this?

That said, I just now know you're in group A. So you can admit that
the communication channel for group A does not work well enough so
far.

> perhaps you could say something
> like: "the maintainers of several of the koffice components have moved
> to Calligra, but Group A is also continuing to develop them. You can
> ask in #calligra if you are interested in the new direction the group
> is moving."?

True

> I'm sure Thomas would prefer that you not mention Calligra at all in
> the koffice channel, but I realize that this is an area of ongoing
> debate which will eventually be decided by the arbitration process.

Please read the above: the proposed temporary solution was from the
beginning to have both groups owned and use #koffice only to redirect
to one of them depending on the question.
BTW, It's not fault of either group that most of the time one group is
more active than the other. "Who codes, decides" rule, just
generalized.

> In the meantime, if the rest of you could make an effort toward
> civility and a balanced treatment of the two projects, that would make
> life a lot easier for those of us "caught in between".

true

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek
 Kexi & Calligra (kexi-project.org, identi.ca/kexi, calligra-suite.org)
 KDE Software Development Platform on MS Windows (windows.kde.org)
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