Structural changes coming up

As you may have sensed by now, we are having problems this year getting out a proper release of the desktop environments we ship. There is more than one reason for that. For one it was really hard to get things in shape for a release. KDE for example was in heavy developement most of the time. Now that we have Plasma 5.8.x with longtime support, things settle down a bit and we will hopefuly get a release of that flavour out until the end of the year. GNOME and Cinnamon are also in steady movement, Xfce and MATE don’t move that much.

On the other hand the time that siduction team members have at their hands have lessened over time. Speaking for myself, my workload has grown a lot during the past two years. Another team member joined a team that took on the job to bring LXQt in shape and into Debian (and they succeeded). A third team member got himself a job whereas before he was unemployed for some time (and of course we are happy for him). All these constraints make it harder to achieve our goals of releasing siduction in the way we did until now. That does not mean in any way that siduction is unmaintained. We steadily work on it as is needed and try to guide you through shallow waters. Just the big tasks like releases get left behind.

There were no new contributors joining the team, so that does not help either. So we have come up with an idea that will lessen our workload a bit. The idea is for flavour maintainers to determine when a flavour is good and ready for release. We know in advance what is going to happen in critical flavours and if there is transitions or other big changes coming up, that might brake things. So, e.g. when KDE seems in good shape to be released to the public, so may be another flavour. Then those two could go out as a snapshot. Possibly a month later some other flavours are good to go.

We found a long time contributor, who is willing to manage these kind of releases. That means checking if the flavour(s) are in releasable shape, coordinate a release and ship them on their way to you. That will help us and our users. You as a user get fresher snapshots as entry points to the distribution, which also attracts new users. For us as the team behind siduction it raises the visibility of the distribution, which also attracts new users and maybe even contributors. So we will give this a try and see how it goes. Like I said before, we hope to get results out before the end of the year.

One other thing that is in dire need of love is our manual. Once a wealth of knowledge, it is now vastly aging and mostly unmaintained. The way it is technicaly set up makes it hard to contribute to and very unwieldy for us to maintain the infrastructure. There is two things to do here: We need to do the heavy lifting of transferring the content to a multilingual wiki like MediaWiki. We have languages in the manual, that are totaly unmaintained because noone in the team speaks the language (nor has the time) to work on these. Those languages are Portugese, Italian, Romanian, and Polish. We still need to decide what to do with them. Right now they are counterproductive because in parts they are by now plain wrong or misleasing. My idea is to archive them until maybe someone later picks up a language.

The second task is to go over all German and English items in the manual and correct them where needed and bring them up to current, also write new ones (e.g. for systemd). All this needs manpower. So if you would like to help with any of this, you are very welcome, please reach out to us on our forum or on IRC on the OFTC network in #siduction-core. Working over the manual can be done as your time allows, there is no ETA to this. We are also always looking for artists. This is also a commitment that does not take up much of your time, it is mostly about creating an icon here and there.

One thought on “Structural changes coming up

  1. Hi Devil,

    wenn das so einfach wäre mit der Mitarbeit. 🙂 Ich bin zwar ein interssierter aber doch nur Nutzer und auf keinem Gebiet irgendwie ein Experte oder habe ein ausgeprägteres Wissen als der Durchschnitt. Damit fällt die Mitarbeit in der Entwicklung schon mal komplett weg und auch der Nutzen für das Manual ist sehr eingeschränkt denn auch dazu benötigt man schon ein etwas detaillierteres Wissen zu dem worüber man schreibt. Ich könnte bestenfalls noch unterstützen bei der Übersetzung ins Italienische auch wenn ich jetzt nicht unbedingt der tolle Hecht im technischen Italienisch bin aber ist hier überhaupt Bedarf? Haben wir überhaupt italienische Nutzer in nenneswerter Zahl?
    Schade aber der gute Wille reicht hier halt leider nicht.

    Schönen Gruß
    Peter

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