Proposal: KDE Invent based Incubator process

Motivation

As I learned when I went through the Incubator process myself, it doesn’t encourage projects to join KDE - on the contrary, it’s rather suited to scare them away.

Main issues with the current process:

  • It is not obvious what the required steps are and how to follow them.

  • If the process gets stuck, there’s no way to find out why. In my case, the email simply never made it to the mailing list. I couldn’t tell if that was the case or just nobody responded.

  • It is rather difficult to find support.

Proposal

Follow a similar approach to flathub, i.e. add an incubator repository in KDE Invent. Here, people can raise an issue/MR to add their project. Note: As everybody who’s interested can watch the repository, the mailing list would not be used anymore.

This would have several advantages:

  • Low entry barrier. Everyone with a KDE Invent account can easily start the process (even without understanding all required steps of the process).

  • Traceability and transparency: the current status is always visible, it is easy to track open Incubator processes and monitor why they don’t progress.

  • Everybody can help unblocking Incubator processes, assisting in whatever question etc.

4 Likes

This sounds like a good idea. It would mirror the other recent proposal to have kdereview run through invent rather than on mailing lists. If you have an app you’d like to propose for Invent we could use it as a test case to see how it would work

1 Like

I do not have an app myself but maybe we could use Connor Carney / qreadable · GitLab.

1 Like

I have something now: Plata Hill / Kalm · GitLab

1 Like

kdereview proposal is at
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2023q1/007520.html

I think the most straight forward way is to get a global group label in gitlab for these and then require an issue to be filed, preferably with a timeout on it for each review.

I’ve edited the incubation page now to say to use an issue on invent.kde.org and I’ve tidied up the old projects so there’s now only 1 outstanding incubtation in progress (kstopmotion).
Incubator - KDE Community Wiki