Thursday, September 25, 2014

The KDE Gardening Team

At Akademy I did a short talk (8 min) + herded a BoF with a title called "Quality is in the eye of the beholder".

One of the topics was that we should try to get a team of people to care about the global state of KDE software, we've decided to call this "The Gardening Team".

The mandate of the team is to:
# Find *really* important bugs and ping people to fix them
# Find stale reviewboards and ping people to fix them
# Bugzilla gardening, close old products etc
# Find projects that need love and give them some

For that we have various ideas:

Try to find monthly a bug to get people to fix it, by highlighting it as "The Bug of The Month" or something. Of course this bug can't be stuff like "Make Okular support javascript", it has to be something that is really a pain point of the whole user base and we think we can find people to fix it, it makes no sense setting impossible goals ;)

Do routine passes over reviewboard trying to identify stale requests and finding people to help moving those.

Run something called "Love Project". The idea is to pick up a project that is somewhat stale, and for a short amount of time (let's say 2/3 months) try to get a new release out, fix the most important crashers/bugs, get the review boards released, etc. This goal of the team is *not* becoming the maintainers of the project, but maybe by virtue of the "Love Project" we can attract new contributors that decide to.

Since we're only a few maybe we can't do this all, so we're focusing on a particular "Love Project" by now, but you should join and help us do more!

Our current Love Project is K3b, that had 2.0.2 released a long time ago and has a 2.0 branch with a few more bugfixes that have been never released.

We are coordinating through https://todo.kde.org/?controller=board&action=show&project_id=26 at the moment but plan to get a mailing list soon (or invade an unused existing one).

If you're interested, comment and i'll give you a shout when the list is created, no mega skills are needed (though people with mega skills are also welcome ;))

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Exciting to hear about the Gardening Team Albert. If there's anything we can do from the VDG side to help, just holler!

Jeremy Whiting said...

A mailing list has been set up here: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-gardening

Valorie said...

This sounds so much like the KDE Quality team: https://community.kde.org/Getinvolved/Quality . I love the idea of gardening to feed the KDE community, and I think we should build on the work that has already been done as well. I'm really happy to hear the enthusiasm, and will help in any way I can.

Albert Astals Cid said...

@Valorie: I think i disagree, KDE Quality team to me seems to be about testing and bug triaging (or at least that's what the wiki page tells to me).

The Gardening Team is not about testing nor about bug triaging.

It's about finding people to fix important bugs (which needs to know what are the important bugs first)

It's about making sure we don't have stale reviewboards

It's about making sure we don't have "incorrect" bugzilla products open

It's about jumping for a few months into a project to give it some love.

So yes there's some similarities in how bugs are involved, but besides that i think the two efforts are valid and different.

Anonymous said...

Nice to hear!

I have a first candidate for "gardening":
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324975

hth!