git 'er done

I can't believe nobody has blogged this yet, but kdelibs and kdebase are now both in git! There's also been a bit of a reorganization undertaken. Led by our fearless git migration rule writers Ian and Nicolás, we have five repositories where once there were four:

• kdelibs (ok, no surprises yet..)


• kde-runtime, which used to be kdebase/runtime/


• kde-baseapps, which lumps together the file managers and related utilities (like bookmarks editors, kdialog, etc)


• konsole


• kde-workspace, which used to be kdebase/workspace and now contains all things Plasma Workspaces; yes, that includes stuff like the mighty KWin and KSysGuard. Of course libplasma is still in kdelibs.

Also of note is that the KTextEditor interface, while still in kdelibs, is primarily developed in (and sync'd with) the code in the Kate git repository.

This is setting the stage for a nice opportunity for us to work on the further modularization of the KDE Platform for app devel while also giving the workspaces a clearer and more separate footing on their own.

Judging by the commit rate, it's also making us more efficient already. :) Some "getting used to this new set of tools" accidents are happening, but we've got some great and caring shepherds helping the herd on its way.

The sys admins have, as usual, been phenomenal. Many of us are using this trick to not only make our git clone commands shorter, but to also set up a very clever system in which pulls transparently happen from anongit and only pushes go the slow boat route through ssh. To put the proverbial cherry on top, sysadmin wrangled it so that when something is pushed to git.kde.org is immediately start propagating to the anongit servers. This push approach means no delay for (and thus no collaboration downside to using) the anongit servers. Pure magic.

I hear rumblings of both KDE Edu and KDE Games about to take the plunge as well. Expect lots more repositories which, I fear, will make building by hand a bit more time consuming. The savior is likely to be kdesrc-build or something very much like it. With the XML being generated by projects.kde.org, doing meta-builds (e.g. "give me all the edu titles") should still be single commands and, even better, fully automated as things change in the repositories. (Including interdependencies!) I'm optimistic that this will replace our somewhat hard to get through "how to get started building KDE" documentation we have right now on Techbase with something that takes 10 minutes to install, learn and set running to get a complete build. We're not there yet, but we're on our way!