Waste of resources – bye bye Debian KDE Team

Ok, I am giving up on the Debian KDE Team. After having updated about 200 packages and sent merge requests for all of them, most have been simply ignored, and the very same changes have been made over and over again.

It really seems that the Debian/KDE Team as a personal problem with me, and prefer to ignore work (here here here here). Not that I didn’t share what I have done with them. I prepared merge requests, after indication, I went through most of the packages to follow the very strict guidelines about changelog formatting to make the team (some of them) happy, and all I see is complete stonewalling.

Congratulations to the KDE/Qt Team in Debian, you have lost another one (not the first reading some email lists) who could help you share the work. Instead of actively interacting you did prefer to ignore, shame, and stonewalled anything coming from me.

I will continue providing my own KDE packages for Debian – I do expect that many packages especially in Plasma will continue to lag up to 2 years behind – but doing work to fix this is obviously not appreciated by the respective team.

Enjoy.

PS: this post is not aggregated to Debian Planet, out of obvious reasons.

PPS: I have deleted all my KDE related forks and closed all merge requests from Debian Salsa (341 each).

14 Responses

  1. Andy Prough says:

    I’m going to see if I can get KDE 5.18.5 working in Devuan using your repos. Since I was able to do it in MX Linux, which also defaults to sysvinit, I’m hoping it will work just as well in Devuan. Who knows – maybe the Devuan or the MX folks would actually appreciate your hard work, Norbert, and would package it with one of their distros.

    • Thanks Andy for your comment. I don’t think there is a serious dependency in systemd here, so should be fine with Devuan. If there is anything I can help you in Devuan, let me know.

      • Andy Prough says:

        Hi Norbert, KDE 5.18.5 installed without problem in Devuan 3.0.0. I enabled the Devuan unstable repo first to handle any dependencies. Seems to be running very well.

  2. Bodiro says:

    How come that your repositories are no longer working for me? No relase-file and verification problem.

  3. Dean says:

    Pretty sad state of affairs seeing you’ve done all the work… the whole Debian/KDE community could have benefited…

  4. Werner Joss says:

    Hi Norbert,
    this is really a sad situation, I was hoping your work would lead to a more up-to-date KDE in debian in not too far future.
    I never understood why debian always insisted to have an outdated KDE in their repo.
    The good news in your post, however, ist that you will continue to provide your own packages on OBS – I’l promote them as much as I can 😀 .

  5. The thing of Debian, the conservatism is one thing that can be understood and another is the stupidity, that is not understood.
    I’m not a programmer but if you need help to inform, you can count on me and my Blog.

  6. Martin Steigerwald says:

    I felt sad to read about this, Norbert. While for now at least I continue to use the official packages, I see how you wanted to help. For sure the members of the Debian/Kubuntu Qt/KDE team you talked about will have a different story. And none of it is inherently right or wrong. So yeah, it is probably best to agree to disagree here. Still I feel a bit sad about this duplication of effort that would have been unnecessary if you where able to get longer with each other.

    • HI Martin,
      thanks for your comment. Sure enough the Debian Qt/KDE team has a different story, that is fine with me. I still try to give feedback to changes made in the git repos at salsa if there are things that needs to be fixed/done differently (because I have built all packages by hand already and know what breaks), but after having 341 pull requests plain and simply ignored – after having spent a huge time just to fix the changelog entry (formalities!), I have to say my interest in investing time into presenting my work on a silver platter is 0.

      It is the same with frameworks 5.71 and plasma 5.19.2, all built manually, checked, adjusted. But then getting told that “don’t send merge requests for simple version bumps”, even if this is all that is needed, it needed the time to check it, well, so it be. Let them do their work, I do mine. Sad as it is.

  7. Martin Steigerwald says:

    “to get along with each other” I meant.

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