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:
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It is not obvious what the required steps are and how to follow them.
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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.
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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:
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Low entry barrier. Everyone with a KDE Invent account can easily start the process (even without understanding all required steps of the process).
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Traceability and transparency: the current status is always visible, it is easy to track open Incubator processes and monitor why they don’t progress.
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Everybody can help unblocking Incubator processes, assisting in whatever question etc.