The Genesis of a Plasma patch

At one day, there was a patch. The patch was small and in early development, and it was posted to the Plasma review board. A couple of minutes later, the patch was rejected. Many reasons were given: The patch didn't have the right intention, it would cause bitrod, and it broke the coding style. Not a big thing, this happens every day in a Free Software Environment. Neither something to get excited about nor something to loose hair over it.

Thats the end of the story? Not quite, in the bible it took 7 days as well, right?. So lets look at it a bit more closely. Day one: The review said that the patch contained a coding style error. Of course the review didn't mention where the coding style error was, or even better, on how to fix that (didn't the review board have this awesome patch annotation feature?). It is a quite obvious way to motivate a possible new contributor by giving him constructive feedback on how to improve his patch. Not a big deal? Not a big deal. However, as it was mentioned as the last point in a long rambling did make it smell a little bit like "Even if you manage to fix all the flaws mentioned before, have fun figuring out how you make me like the arrangement of spaces in your patch!".

There was Day, and there was night. 2nd. Day. Now.. where was I? Ah right, light!.. eh Plasma! So, the patch had its intention to hide the Plasma toolbox from the KDE 4.0.x desktop. The KDE 4.0 desktop was released in January in its first stable release, intended for early adopters. It was expressed quite clear that it is not finished yet ,and the adequate set of features will come with KDE 4.1. So what would be more obvious to highlight the pure beauty and new shininess of KDE 4.1 by introducing a feature-complete plasma toolbox with KDE 4.1? I spend my second day thinking about this.

There was Night, and there was Day. 3rd Day. Lets enjoy some quote from the review:

you can, of course, put this patch in your downstream builds. you'll be doing the project a disservice, however. or are we not actually developing software in the open anymore but only delivering a final product and therefore completely avoiding the entire feedback cycle?

A couple of things to notice: The patch wasn't posted by a distribution, it was posted by a KDE developer. It does sound strange that a normal KDE developer is suddenly downstream and only Plasma developers are upstream, but this is how it was communicated. Ah, you're saying that I'm ironic and that I know that in my other live I'm also a distro guy? Fair enough, I should have known that. Obviously I cannot be two persons at the same time. And of course I'm doing a disservice to the project by posting a patch to upstream (!) instead of just patching it downstream. In addition my disservice to the project is trying to polish a stable code branch (nowhere this patch was mentioned to be intended for the KDE 4.1 development tree). I'll spend the rest of the day thinking about if we want to alienate our userbase even more by making them swallow down an unfinished product with rough edges and give them the feeling that whatever code branch, name it stable and released or unreleased and in development, they get the same amount of bleeding. Be free, and bleed freely.

• It allows you to add a plasmoid to the background.
• It has a "break your desktop" button.

While it is arguably true, that the "Add plasmoid" (it is actually called "Add widgets" btw) has some value (the same value the context menu on the background, the panel, the kickoff menu and probably a couple of other places have as well). Note that I also don't want to mention how KDE 3 users have managed to find the hidden context menu in the past to add an applet to their panel, not because it is unimportant, just that I only have one week and I'm already at day 4.

So there was Night, and there was Day. 5th Day. You're expecting me to follow up on the "Break your desktop" ? Okay, well.. its the general reaction you get when you let new people that pop up on a fair where you demo the desktop try it. They go like "uhh.. it turns white.. I broke it!" and jump away from the computer, being frightened that they made a change that they cannot undo. but there is undo, right? Well, only 3 levels of undo, to be honest: if you zoom out more than 3 times, you cannot zoom back in, because you can't actually press the button anymore. The only way to undo that is to delete your plasma configuration or, for the average user, to reinstall your computer. Oh, another thing you learn from being a distro guy: whenever something happens that average users don't expect and they can't undo: they either call support (be it the 24 hour child/mother support hotline or some other) or if they have a little bit more knowledge, reinstall their computer. Or they ask somewhere on the net and get the recommendation to rm -rf ~/.kde. I spent the rest of the day enjoying the other blog about the "break your desktop" button and the followup, which was particularly funny. Unfortunately I cannot link that one anymore because the blog posting was pulled from the net. you can still find it in the Google cache if you try really hard. In essence it said that whenever one has a certain issue with Plasma, one should contact the developer mailing list instead of publically blogging about it. Which I did, btw. Or didn't I? Did I only blog because somebody else blogged about my blog which I'm writing now? Damn, I wish I'd had a day left to think about that.

So there was Night, and there was Day. 6th Day. I think after collecting the pieces, it is time to finish up. Or in my case, understand the big picture. Perhaps today "it also will grow into something that has clearer purpose". But wait, isn't that admitting that the previous days didn't have a clear purpose? The big picture for me is that somewhen we've apparently forgotten what it takes to be a good community: Be friendly, be constructive, allow different opinions to co-exist and clearly distinguish between technical issues and emotionally-overloaded sandbox-thinking. An additional bonus is to provide leadership by actually inspiring others and give them a clear vision, a vision that they can implement, that they can bugfix and polish and that they can understand well enough to share it with others.

So there was Night, and there was Day. 7th Day. And today, I need a bit of rest from all the blogging. Doesn't it piss you off as well that you can ping as much as you like, be open and constructive for a discussion as you like and still only end up being able to write up your own thoughts up in a post without actually being able to establish any constructive mind-sharing?

So, thats it. Or as downstream puts it: Have a lot of fun.