8 months with KDE and openSUSE - looking back after the 13.1 release

And so, finally openSUSE 13.1 is out of the door (I couldn’t celebrate like I wanted, as I’ve been very busy). This release has lots of improvements, and of course, the latest stable software from KDE. It is time (perhaps?) to look back and see what the team has done during this development cycle.

With regards to the KDE software packaging, the past 8 months have seen quite an increase in the involvement of poeple from the community. Aside the “usual suspects” like Raymond “tittiatcoke” Wooninck and Hrvoje “shumski” Senjan, we’ve seen offers from help from the Cloverleaf community (now folded into openSUSE) and in general an increase of non-SUSE contributions. Relationship with upstream has also improved, as a number of changes present in the packages were submitted directly to KDE (which is always a good thing).

There were also some much-needed organizational changes in projects, to keep things manageable. And thanks to the effort of shumski, openSUSE offers, like other distributions, regularly updated KF5 packages to help with development and testing. Aside for the very-bleeding-edge-it-will-kill-you software, the team eats a lot of its own dogfood, testing things as much as possible (and suffering from fallouts, sometimes ;) before pushing them to stable packages.

The goals for the future? Make the KLyDE splitting, originally devised and implemented by Will Stephenson of KDE and SUSE fame, a reality for the next version of openSUSE (13.2): there are quite a number of months ahead so it’s the perfect time for changing things and testing. Aside splitting, we’ll be watching closely the KF5 work, so that once releasable versions come out (in about a year) we’ll be ready to offer them in the distribution (as an option over the stable 4.x series, of course).

It may not seem like a large list, but it is a lot of work. ;) So if you feel like helping, don’t be shy and drop us a note either on IRC (#opensuse-kde) or on the opensuse-kde maling list.