Looking for maintainers for a few KIPI plugins

written on Sunday, January 10, 2010

For the past few months I haven't been able to find enough time and motivation to work on the two KIPI plugins I am supposed to maintain: HTML Export and Batch Image Processing.

I think it's time for me to acknowledge that I am doing a disservice to users by lagging on bug reports and being practically inactive. This probably come from the fact that I do not have a personal need for these plugins, so it would be better for them to find maintainers who really care about them.

In case you don't know about it, KIPI stands for KDE Image Plugin Interface. It is a library which makes it possible to share plugins between imaging applications. As far as I know, KIPI plugins are used by digiKam, KPhotoAlbum and Gwenview.

Right now most KIPI plugin developers are also digiKam developers, which is the reason it took me so long to decide giving up on the plugins I (am supposed to) maintain: it did not feel fair to let digiKam developers indirectly work for Gwenview without giving something back to digiKam.

The "Batch Image Processing" and "Raw converter" plugins (also in need of a maintainer) are going to be disabled in the next version of digiKam because digiKam is going to provide more tighly integrated implementations of these tools (see Gilles post about Batch Queue Manager). This is why it is very important to get new developers involved: no one can expect digiKam developers to maintain plugins which are not available in their application.

KIPI plugins are usually small code bases, which can be relatively easy to grasp for a newcomer. Working on a KIPI plugin is also a great way to contribute to several applications at a time! Of course I intend to help new maintainers getting used to the code bases as much as I can. If you are interested, join the kde-imaging mailing list and get started!