2012/1/11 Will Stephenson :

* Upstream KDE Release Schedule There is no 4.9 schedule yet (what is it with release managers and christmas?) but since KDE follows a 6-monthly cycle, add a year to the 4.7 schedule and we would have 4.9.0 on July 27 2012.  So this is out for us.  This means we'll probably have 4.8.4 in 12.2. Which is perfect. Having latest minor .z stable KDE release for stable openSUSE release should be our new policy, IMHO. Of course, no big version bumps, but supplying latest minor version is good.

* Factors affecting KDE in the rest of the distro Traditionally we end up reacting to these late and 'best-effort', usually because these are changes to the platform authored by redhat, adopted by openSUSE and GNOME gets them for 'free' from upstream RH, or because some other part of SUSE decides it doesn't want to take care of a feature for us any more.  I'd like us to be aware of these as early as possible this time, work out the implications and the work required to turn these changes into opportunities for us rather than damage limitation exercises. ** Plymouth as bootsplash ** Systemd changes in 12.2 I don't know what these are, but I suspect they may have some influence on KDM Most of the work here will happen on their mutual integration, so influence on KDM is of low possibility (Fedora and Mint guys are using this stuff (I mean, plymouth) for some time now, AFAIK). However, there are existing KDM hiccups we need to clean up, see below.

==Want To=== These are things we would like to do as a value addition to the purely mechanistic changes pushed on us by upstream.

I have a few things in mind, to kick the discussion off I'll mention a couple here: * Quality focus 4.8, and 4.8.4 should be highly stable from upstream (changes to the platform are happening in the KDE Frameworks 5 work, so it and any 4.9 are going to be very incremental).  As a distribution we can build on this with polish and targeted bugfixing based on our users' feedback. Of course things like Apper + stack, Akonadi + stack, Nepomuk + stack are big items here, but also many things that are simpler to contribute to, such as missing icons, improving translations, clarifying bad strings in the UI, cleaning up the start menu tree, setting default package selections can be done. I support this quality focus so much, guys, you can't even imagine =) Other distributions had their minor glitches removal initiatives (like Ubuntu's "papercuts" stuff), maybe it's finally time for our own? Having a really stable upstream KDE release gives us some more resources on enhancing and polishing SUSE-specific user experience, removing some "papercuts" introduced earlier. For example, KDM alone gives at least three hiccups: *No user list in current theme *No windows domain logon in current theme *Not working kcm module (bnc#267903 will soon be 5 years old, c'mon, guys, fix is rather trivial there)

* Integrate Plasma Active in openSUSE A lot of PA stuff has only been usable using git branches, but these should be mostly integrated to make a current version of PA in openSUSE doable by know. Since open-slx is our downstream, most of the work is already done. I've tried some open-slx images and Plasma Active is absolutely great, but having the ability to easily switch between three available interfaces (plasma-desktop, plasma-netbook and plasma-device) on stock openSUSE will be astonishing (if possible, of course =) ) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kde+owner@opensuse.org

Onsdag den 11. januar 2012 12:57:50 Will Stephenson skrev:

Apologies for being so quiet over Xmas - I was gathering the energies for a busy 2012 to make openSUSE bigger than ever.

It's high time we nailed down what we will do for KDE in 12.2.

We can separate these into things we want to do, and things we have to do. None of these lists are complete IMO, please help to fill them out.

I'd like to suggest a strong focus on polishing the default installation/workspace (enabling touchpad tapping by default, a working updater applet, clicking on a local RPM should be able to install it reliably, including video thumbnailer in default install). All these kinds of little niggles that cost us tons of users, and most of which are probably fairly easy to fix. Another little thing that makes a big difference are mimetype associations. Tons of apps are not associated with half of the files they're fully capable of handling. And it makes things so much easier when you can just click on a file and something sensible happens. E.g. you might click on an SVG file which gwenview is perfectly capable of opening, but instead ksuseinstall might pop up and suggest to install some GNOME application (not a verified example). Including Kamoso and Knights in the distribution is a must in my book. And I really hope Akonadi, Nepomuk and Apper/PackageKit will have matured to a point where we can actually focus on polishing the distribution for the last month of the release cycle, instead of scrampling and squeezing in new stuff at the last minute to barely avoid total catastrophe - which has been the case for the last two releases at least. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kde+owner@opensuse.org

Am Mittwoch 11 Januar 2012, 12:57:50 schrieb Will Stephenson:

* Integrate Plasma Active in openSUSE A lot of PA stuff has only been usable using git branches, but these should be mostly integrated to make a current version of PA in openSUSE doable by know. Since open-slx is our downstream, most of the work is already done.

Is that even possible? AFAIK currently Plasma Active or Plasma Desktop are exclusive choices as PD is not compatible with kdelibs+PA patches. Unless something changed in the last two weeks or so, PA3 will be released together with PD 4.9 with both running on KF5 without requiring special patches. Surely KDE upstream will concentrate on PA3, PD 4.9, and KF5, so all further support work would have to be needed to be done by openSUSE KDE Team. It may be worthwhile to postpone PA as supported option to 12.3 because of that. In https://kamikazow.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/very-short-4-8-first-look-from- a-users-perspective/ I explored how I feel that Kontact handles notifications badly as it's often too chatty. Changing a few defaults there is not rocket science. If you guys agree on the notifications aspect, I can take care about that. IMO openSUSE 12.2 should be akin to what 10.3 was: It was released shortly before KDE 4.0 and delivered the best 3.5.x experience out there. It also handpicked a few Qt 4 developments like KDE4-based games. In that spirit 12.2 could ship with Qt 5 and maybe even a few handpicked Qt5/KF5 applications. Markus -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kde+owner@opensuse.org

Am Mittwoch, 11. Januar 2012, 12:57:50 schrieb Will Stephenson:

==Want To=== These are things we would like to do as a value addition to the purely mechanistic changes pushed on us by upstream.

One of the annoyances about PolicyKit is that its systemsettings module does not work because it edits the wrong files (to take effect). Further if a dialogue opens it provides links to the action to edit its settings, which do not work either. http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2011-11/msg01211.html https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=287317 Sven -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kde+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 12:57 PM, Will Stephenson wrote:

Apologies for being so quiet over Xmas - I was gathering the energies for a busy 2012 to make openSUSE bigger than ever.

It's high time we nailed down what we will do for KDE in 12.2.

We can separate these into things we want to do, and things we have to do. None of these lists are complete IMO, please help to fill them out.

==Have To== These are external factors that we have little influence over, that we have to react to * openSUSE 12.2 Release Schedule 12.2 is scheduled for release on 11 July 2012 [1].  Beta 1 is our traditional freeze for major version bumps, usually about 6 weeks before release, so we have until June to change things.  There is no detailed 12.2 roadmap from Coolo yet [2].

* Upstream KDE Release Schedule There is no 4.9 schedule yet (what is it with release managers and christmas?) but since KDE follows a 6-monthly cycle, add a year to the 4.7 schedule and we would have 4.9.0 on July 27 2012.  So this is out for us.  This means we'll probably have 4.8.4 in 12.2. ** Package version updates ** Default configuration adaptations required by 4.8

* Factors affecting KDE in the rest of the distro Traditionally we end up reacting to these late and 'best-effort', usually because these are changes to the platform authored by redhat, adopted by openSUSE and GNOME gets them for 'free' from upstream RH, or because some other part of SUSE decides it doesn't want to take care of a feature for us any more.  I'd like us to be aware of these as early as possible this time, work out the implications and the work required to turn these changes into opportunities for us rather than damage limitation exercises. ** Plymouth as bootsplash ** Systemd changes in 12.2 I don't know what these are, but I suspect they may have some influence on KDM ** Kernel/Driver changes The forces of evolution here may require updates in the KWin driver blacklists we ship ** Updated branding We need to integrate any branding changes that come out of the artwork team and make sure they meet our needs.

==Want To=== These are things we would like to do as a value addition to the purely mechanistic changes pushed on us by upstream.

I have a few things in mind, to kick the discussion off I'll mention a couple here: * Quality focus 4.8, and 4.8.4 should be highly stable from upstream (changes to the platform are happening in the KDE Frameworks 5 work, so it and any 4.9 are going to be very incremental).  As a distribution we can build on this with polish and targeted bugfixing based on our users' feedback. Of course things like Apper + stack, Akonadi + stack, Nepomuk + stack are big items here, but also many things that are simpler to contribute to, such as missing icons, improving translations, clarifying bad strings in the UI, cleaning up the start menu tree, setting default package selections can be done. * Improving Activity usability There is still a way to go to make Activities a "Duh! Why didn't we always do things like that".  Based on a bit of common sense and a bit of feedback, I think we should be able to make Activities a lot better with a manageable amount of work, and submit this upstream for 4.9. * Integrate Plasma Active in openSUSE A lot of PA stuff has only been usable using git branches, but these should be mostly integrated to make a current version of PA in openSUSE doable by know. Since open-slx is our downstream, most of the work is already done.

As a final note, please keep the discussion constructive - if your only contribution to 12.2 will be a badly spelled thread hijacking to complain about everything we did wrong, you will have just taken 5 minutes out of everyone else who can make useful changes' openSUSE time, so take it to /dev/null and yourself to the opensuse-kde3 perfect code museum list.

[1] http://en.opensuse.org/Roadmap [2] http://www.suse.de/~coolo/opensuse_12.2 (eventually) [3] http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.7_Release_Schedule [4] http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.8_Release_Schedule

Looking forward to a fun openSUSE KDE 2012...

Will

Another thing that occurred to me: we are currently building KOffice 2.3 and Calligra 2.4 beta in KDF. I think we probably need to decide on one or the other for 12.2, and either remove the other or move it to KDE:Extra. Calligra is scheduled to have a RC in the middle of February and a release in early March. This would give plenty of time even if the release slips by a month or two. According to the mailing list, the last year the KOffice team planned to release their next version at the same time as KDE SC 4.8, but that obviously didn't happen (they have not even had a beta release yet). They also have a much smaller team, only two significantly active developers over the last few months according to the git logs. So I personally vote for dropping KOffice entirely once Calligra reaches the 2.4 RC stage. A new KOffice package can be created based on the openSUSE 12.1 sources when that team makes a new release, although just going on the relative developer base and the lack of applications like Krita I would say that even then KOffice should probably go in KDE:Extra and Calligra should be the one kept in KDF. This opinion, of course, is subject to revision based on the relative qualities of the releases. It does not look like even Calligra will be ready as a default office suite in time for openSUSE 12.2, they seem to be aiming to have Words at least ready for mainstream use by the next release (2.5), which I have not seen a specific timeline for but judging by their previous release spacing it almost certainly not going to be before openSUSE 12.2 is released. Other applications may be at better stages, but using an office suite without a word processor ready does not strike me as a good idea. -Todd -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kde+owner@opensuse.org