KF6 Progress Report: Almost Bastille Day (July) Edition

So the world has been hectic lately, dunno if you’ve seen the news, but that means that I didn’t publish an update since my previous KF6 progress report back in February! Now that the lock down has been (temporarily?) lifted where I live and that things are a bit less crazy, it’s time for an update.

An actual Qt 6 is not published yet and we didn’t branch for KF6 yet either. Still as can be seen on the KF6 Workboard there are plenty of tasks in our backlog which can be acted upon now . No need to wait to participate, all the work done now will make the transition to KF6 easier later on anyway.

What has been done since the last post?

On the workboard, we currently have 22 tasks in progress and 4 tasks done. Clearly that’s not a huge activity in more than four months but the state of the world might explain it in part. Obviously with so little tasks done, they mostly revolve around our usual suspects.

If you fancy becoming one of the unsung heroes of KDE, come and help working tasks from the KF6 Workboard ! More hands are needed and right now is a good time to discover it and get into it than when Qt6 will be released. Indeed, when Qt6 will be around it will be much less quiet around here. :-)

Let’s see the tasks done during the past couple of months (in no particular order):

• Port akregator away from BrowserRun::saveUrl by David Faure
• Replace KLocalSocket[Server] in KIO by QLocalSocket[Server] by Nicolas Fella
• Move or kill KStatusBarOfflineIndicator by Nicolas Fella
• Introduce Commit Tooling to Check for SPDX Headers by Andreas Cord-Landwehr

Thanks for everyone involved!

KDE Frameworks Community Analytics

Per usual, I will use the opportunity to look at the community analytics for KDE Frameworks itself. That’s why I ran my scripts against the repositories in the frameworks section of the KDE repositories tree. Of course, this means we’ll capture some activity unrelated to the KF6 transition. Still I think it’s interesting to see how KDE Frameworks itself is doing.

Let’s start with the commit activity since the previous KF6 Progress Report.

[ KDE Frameworks Activity since the February update, full page version ]

During that time frame, we got 126 different committers. That’s quite a lot indeed the biggest amount of committers since I started writing those reports! Admittedly, the longer time spans skews this quite a bit, so I thought I’d add the team size trend for the past ten years to see.

[ KDE Frameworks Team Size since January 2010, full page version ]

Unsurprisingly we didn’t have a super growth, so the 126 above is really due to the longer time window. That being said it looks like the trend has been going slightly up since the past couple of years, always a good thing.

Now, how does the code contributor network looks like?

[ KDE Frameworks Contributor Network since the February update, full page version ]

Unsurprisingly, we find our usual suspects again as very central to the network. Like the last couple of times we find a couple of lesser known names in that set of central people… Although at that point I can stop saying this, it’s been a few times clearly they’re part of the team now. Well done!

How You Can Help

Next time, your name could be in visualizations like the ones above!

Check out the KF6 Workboard and pick a task to help us toward this great transition. If you need help to get started, feel free to contact us on the #kde-devel IRC channel on Freenode.

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation .