Walking the Extra Mile

written on Thursday, June 28, 2012

Humps for 1 mile by Wendy on Flickr

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know I tend to get obsessed with fixing little details in KDE applications which annoy me. I like doing this, but this is the kind of task which cannot be done by a lonesome coder if one wants to make a significant difference.

Other free software projects have launched initiatives in the past to get those little details ironed out. You may have heard about Ubuntu Papercuts, Fedora Fit and Finish or Gnome Every Detail Matters initiatives.

I want to start a similar initiative for KDE. To do so, I registered a BoF this year at Akademy, named "the Extra Mile". The goal of this BoF is not to get started at fixing bugs right away, but rather discuss how we can organize ourself to make this initiative a success. I want to discuss topics such as:

• Which communication tool should we use (Bugzilla, Community Wiki, Forum, Mailing Lists?) and how should we use it
• How to approach those bugs. Should we work on many apps at a time, fixing common bugs? Should we identify and fix as many bugs as possible within one app? Or should we go for a mix of both?
• What is the best way to engage with application developers and raise awareness on these kind of issues

We are going to need people with different profiles to get this to work: developers interested in fixing bugs in their and/or other applications, UI specialists, but also users willing to report and triage those issues.

If you are interested, the BoF is scheduled on Thursday 10:30, room 227. I also created a wiki page for it.

PS: Please do not use the comments on this blog post to report issues you want to get fixed. It's just not going to scale :) When the BoF is over we will announce how we are going to tackle those issues, at this time your input will be very much appreciated.