18–25 Jun 2021
UTC timezone

KF6 the Architecture Overview - Time to Slice Things Up Yet Again

19 Jun 2021, 19:00
40m
Talk Track 2

Speaker

Dr Kevin Ottens (enioka Haute Couture)

Description

A new Qt major version has been released. As usual this is when we really get into preparing the next incarnation of our development platform. The last time we went full steam into cutting kdelibs into pieces. What are we going to do this time? Beware, this talk might include references from slasher movies.


The move from kdelibs4 to KF5 was kind of our own Copernician Revolution. We used the opportunity to split our single platform package into dozens of components. This served us well but the model proposed to structure them is showing some limitations. With KF6 this is our opportunity to address those issues.

In this talk, we will revisit how the KF5 offer has been structured. From that scheme we will highlight what worked well and not so well.

Then we will proceed with an idea which was discussed during the latest KDE Frameworks Sprint and see how it could improve things. This is an interesting cocktail which is one part technical, one part community and one part marketing. Indeed, it might end up redefining in parts the nature of both KDE Frameworks and Plasma.

Finally, we will explore the current state of our frameworks to see how far we are from the new envisioned structure and how feasible this rethinking of our platform is.

Authors' Bio

Kevin Ottens has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence which led him to focus on ontology engineering and multi-agent systems. As a student, he fell in love with the KDE community and is now well into spending more than 15 years contributing to KDE and Qt. He has been also helping with the community stewardship, for instance participating in the creation of the KDE Manifesto. Nowadays, Kevin strives at enioka Haute Couture having a very wide view on software engineering. His responsibilities range from software architecture and code to Open Source strategies. He also spends time coaching teams and other engineers in leadership positions. He still lives in Toulouse where he gives a few lectures in his former University.

Primary author

Dr Kevin Ottens (enioka Haute Couture)

Presentation materials