Mario Fux

Our first meeting was quite successful. Something like 10 people participated. We discussed and introduced the current state of the CI system and got an introduction to the current Season of KDE project which Scarlett Clarks is working on and about the Mac OS X CI system. Afterwards we talked about what everybody could do and then decided what do to next and who works on what. Some work items are:

• Evaluation of different CI solutions
• Different platforms like Windows and Android
• Continue with the current work

So there is progress (just today I saw huge progress on the Mac front) and I’d like to thank all the people who help for their time and dedication.

Interested people should read the summary (including a full IRC log) for more information.

And if you don’t have (yet) a KDE Account and thus can’t check the logs, mail me and I’ll send them to you.

Next IRC meeting is going to happen on Tuesday, 16th of December 2014, 8 pm CET (UTC+1). So if you want to help, see you there, speak up on kde-devel or ping me (unormal) on freenode IRC.

This blog post is about another possibility to contribute to KDE. It’s about taking work off Ben’s shoulders and about fixing the bus factor for our great CI (Continuous Integration) system.

I’d like to start a series of weekly or bi-weekly (to be decided) IRC meetings to coordinate the work to understand, change and enhance our CI system and therefore we need a first date. So if you’re interested please add yourself to this Doodle (think about different timezones!).

Prospective agenda for the IRC meeting:

• Ben: Short introduction to KDE CI
• Everybody: Short introduction incl. their skills and wishes for KDE CI
• Ben: What needs to be changed
• Everybody: Work on a roadmap and distribute work till next meeting
• Everybody: Determine date for the next IRC meeting

This is your chance to help KDE to enhance the code quality and spread to even more platforms and thus bring our great software to even more computers and people. But if you prefer to support us in another way their is our ongoing fundraiser. Thanks for considering to help us!

And one last thing about the KDE CI system: we’ve a page about CI on the Frameworks wiki too.

Short Personal note: My diploma thesis was finally accepted (and thus again thanks to everybody who wished me all the best for my thesis!) and thus I’ve a bit more time (to coordinate some stuff in KDE ;-). But I still need to learn and pass the exams (and there is some other big private change in my life soon to come ;-).

I’d like to quote Maximiliano Curia’s email here:

Hi all!

For quite a while now the KDE team has been severely understaffed. We maintain
a lot of packages, with many different kinds of bugs, but we don’t have enough
people to do all the work that needs to be done. We have tools that help us
automate the update to new upstream releases, but that’s just the tip of the
iceberg of our work and so we are writing to invite more people to get
involved in the team and help us get KDE software in Debian into better shape.

Some of the tasks that we need help with are:

+ Bug triaging: there are many many bugs in the BTS. We need people that go
through them, understand the problem and how to reproduce it, confirm
that they are still present in the latest versions. In particular, there
are bugs affecting the version in wheezy, and we need people to go through
those as well.

+ Bug forwarding: we are so understaffed that we have been asking users to
forward the bugs upstream themselves. Some users do this, but some don’t.
It would help us a lot to have people in the team in charge of this.

+ Patch forwarding: we have quite a bunch of patches applied in the Debian
packages that should be applied upstream. Some need to be generalized
instead of being Debian-specific. This work would save us time in the
future, so it’s very important to get it done.

+ Upgrade-testing: in the past, the upgrade from one Debian stable to the
other has been quite traumatic for KDE software users. We need people to
try upgrading from wheezy to jessie and report any bugs that they might
encounter so that we can fix them ahead of the release.

+ Creating patches: many of the bugs that we have require writing patches,
some are easy and some are harder, but any help here would be really
appreciated.

+ Packaging other KDE apps: we have packages for the core components of KDE
software, but there are many other useful components that still need to
get packaged.

+ Updating our welcoming wiki page [1], adding these tasks and any future
tasks, and unifying the todo lists [2].

If you are interested in helping with any of these, please join our irc
channel #debian-qt-kde in irc.oftc.net, or our mailing list [3]. We are happy
to help you get started.

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/PkgKde
[2]: https://wiki.debian.org/KDETodo
https://wiki.debian.org/KdeDebTasks
http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/todo.html
gobby://gobby.debian.org/Teams/KDE/TODO
[3]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-qt-kde/