New maintainers wanted: KDE Telepathy, KAccounts, Plasma Notifications and others

As I got a new job unrelated to KDE couple months ago, I'm finding myself having less and less time and motivation to keep up with my maintainer's duties. Therefore I think it's time to pass on some of the KDE things that have my name in the "maintainer" field.

First off, there's the whole notifications stack, which includes KNotifications framework, the fdo notifications server and finally Plasma's popup notifications. The whole stack is relatively simple and does not require much attention, but it could use some forward pushing to not be stuck in 2009 anymore.

Staying in the Plasma land, I'd really like to hand the whole clock + calendar stack to a dedicated maintainer. This is the bottom-right part of the default Plasma panel - the clock applet, the calendar applet, the backend for these applets, calendar events, proper timezones support and all the pieces around.  These things can get quite complex to grasp and improve, yet are a crucial part of the desktop experience and deserve much more attention than they get now.

KAccounts, the system to set up your online accounts, could use some much needed improvements and expansions as well as integrating with the new Akonadi/Sink/Kube-thing. If the last part will not happen, and it certainly doesn't look like it will, I'm afraid that KAccounts in Plasma would no longer serve its purpose and would become a burden rather than a useful system component.

The last one and the biggest one - the 12 repos of KDE Telepathy. Now this project is effectively dead. It hasn't seen any real development for more than a year and basically is just on life support ever since the core team had to leave the project because of job and life constraints. The other factor is also the wide spread of mobile phones and mobile IM clients; chatting on the desktop in not entirely modern interfaces with limited protocol support is not as popular these days. But it would still be nice to have someone at least oversee the couple of incoming patches every now and then.

I think that at least the first two stacks are totally vital for Plasma desktop and really need some attention. If you'd like to put your name on any of the things above, please let me know. I'll make sure to do a proper hand-off with explaining everything :)

Comments

[colomar]

On the one hand, it's sad to see that from what it looks like you'll be pretty much quitting KDE (your contributions will definitely be missed!), but on the other hand, it's good that you're starting the search for new maintainers before things bitrot too much.

[Luizluca.blogspot.com]

Sorry to hear that Marty.

I'm a daily user of kde telepathy and it's really sad to hear nobody is interested in it anymore. Desktop messaging is still really relevant for enterprise.

[spartan]

here, too, a telepathy lover and disappointed/sad reading this... Telepathy is the only IM client that I use and my mobile experience adapts to it: no whatsapp, no viber, no messenger, and so on

[DanilosRock1]

I felt sad sad too, reading about KDE Telepathy is going to die. On my case, I use it on my home PC. After Kopete's/MSN death and the quick growth of KTP (and the promise about how it would gonna be), I felt that was really the right way to go, and I was quickly adapted to it, too.

The thing is - let's face it - I don't really think chatting on mobile devices is that user-friendly. I think people still need solutions like KTP for chatting. Using a phone or tablet for chatting is still awkward. Whatsapp web was born for that reason, to avoid users switching from PC to phone/tablet to keep a chat.

Maybe it would be good to ask for help for KTP. I just learnt with this post the current KTP development status, and I guess many people (which includes people that uses it on their day-to-day, that could be many) isn't aware of that.

There already are some solutions for Whatsapp and Facebook chats for Linux Desktops (looking at the Bitlbee ones), the most popular messaging services right now. I think there could be people interested on helping to do something about it for KTP.

However, thank you for the support you've gave for mantaining this stuff!