[PyKDE] Project Management

[Jonathan Gardner]

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On Friday 11 July 2003 15:44, Jim Bublitz wrote:
> On Friday July 11 2003 10:19, Jonathan Gardner wrote:
> > The problem really is that right now, PyKDE development is
> > having a hard time keeping up with PyQt/sip development. This
> > is due partly because the maintainer PyKDE (Jim Bublitz) is
> > busy, and partly because the maintainer of PyQt (Phil
> > Thompson) is not.
> >

I guess I should clarify here -- Phil and Jim both work to put food on the 
table. I'm pretty sure everyone on the list here does as well, except for 
you deadbeats! ;-)

It's just that for the past couple of months, it seems Phil is making more 
headway than Jim is able to keep up with. Part of this seems to be due to 
Jim making a lot of progress in different areas of PyKDE, which are in 
response to the plea for him to "open up" the development process.

> > The first solution in my mind is that we need to open up
> > development of PyKDE so that it can keep up with PyQt. This is
> > being done by Jim right now, so everything is good there.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean here - if "open up" means more
> frequent releases, I'm aiming for that. On the other hand, if it
> means more participation in development (other than testing, bug
> reports, patches, examples, etc), that's is pretty difficult.
> I'd love to have half a dozen people working on PyKDE, but the
> problem is that it's not modular like kernel development. The
> PyKDE development process is pretty monolithic and
> inter-related. I don't see any way to fix that at the moment,
> and that (or me) is the biggest problem.
>

Jim, you are heading in the right direction. Somewhere in my previous email, 
I meant to have written, "Jim is doing this, so this problem will be going 
away soon." I might've lost it on the edits. I absolutely do not want you 
to feel discouraged. That's like "biting the hands that feeds me".

As far as how to open up, and how to get us all to work together, that is 
something we'll figure out. The first step, showing us what you are doing 
right now, will allow us to catch up to you and clean up where you don't 
have time to clean up.

> > A third solution would be a sip 3.7.1 that works with PyQt
> > 3.7.0, 3.7.1, and 3.7.2, if you know what I mean. I think this
> > would alleviate a lot of issues in all three packages. This is
> > a lot of work to implement, even more work to maintain, and
> > probably not a good idea at this point. However, maintaining
> > backwards compatibility is a worthy goal of all software
> > projects.
>
> The problem is that something has to give somewhere in this whole
> thing. It's feasible to maintain support across a wide number of
> versions of Qt, KDE, Python and gcc, but it's not as easy to
> maintain compatibility across sip versions (depends on the
> changes). Again, if PyKDE stays in sync (which it *should* be
> possible to do), the problem mostly goes away.
>

I guess what I really would like to see is sip, PyQt, and PyKDE become more 
independent of each other. sip, PyQt, and PyKDE are like conjoined 
triplets.

How can this be done? I don't know. There are too many problems in 
seperating them. Maybe someone brighter than me can see a way.

> I can post what the PyKDE development process involves if anyone
> is interested. It's quite different than a normal C++ or Python
> project.
>

Release first -- we'll ask questions later. ;-)

- -- 
Jonathan Gardner
jgardner at jonathangardner.net
(was jgardn at alumni.washington.edu)
Live Free, Use Linux!
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