In my previous post on how we organize the KF6 work, I mentioned there would be blog posts announcing the work done by the team to get us closer to KF6. It is time for the first post on that topic!

What better time than the December Solstice for it? Yes… I know… I missed the actual solstice by a few days, but I started the draft around that time and it’s not that far in the past either!

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?

Since the end of the KF6 Kickoff Sprint (end of November), 35 tasks were started which is great. Out of those tasks, 14 were even completed which is even better! What I particularly like in the tasks done is that we find our usual suspects tackling them but also lesser seasoned people in the KDE Frameworks circles. It’s just excellent to witness this. Also I can’t stress it enough: there is work for everyone, it’s a very good time to get your feet wet contributing to KDE Frameworks.

Anyway, here is for the tasks done during the past month (in no particular order):

If you pay close attention, you will see that some of those tasks involved patches outside of KDE Frameworks. This is to be expected (and there are more such tasks), if we want the transition to be easier for the community later on, it’s a good thing to get our applications ready as well. In any case, thanks to everyone involved!

KDE Frameworks Community Analytics?

Since we’re here, it’s a good time 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 won’t capture some of the activity from the tasks above (since as I mentioned some activity is outside KDE Frameworks itself) and it also 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 KF6 Kickoff Sprint.

During that time frame, we got 55 different committers. That’s quite a lot indeed! Of course some of our usual suspects stick out as very active, but it’s nice to see so many other names present and helping with KDE Frameworks.

Now, how does the code contributor network looks like?

Unsurprisingly, we find our usual suspects again as very central to the network. We also find a couple of lesser known names (at least to me) in that set of central people, it’s a good thing I hope they’ll stick around. You might notice quite a few nodes disconnected from the graph: this is fine, on such a collection of loosely related libraries and on such a short time frame it is to be expected. As I keep remembering, high centrality is not an end in itself, in such networks it healthier to have a mix of tightly and loosely connected nodes, it’s exactly what we got here.

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.