Goodbye kwrite-devel@kde.org
The beginnings
Over 24 years ago, our kwrite-devel@kde.org mailing list started with:
From: Scott Manson
To: kwrite-devel@max.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de
Date: Wednesday, February 21st, 2001 at 21:47
Subject: [Kwrite-devel] I just wanted to be the first to post here )
Welcome to kwrite-devel
I hope this is an active list and we can attract some more developers Anyone have any ideas on coding style,enhancements problems please feel free to post your questions/comments here.
or, depending which mail arrived faster in your inbox:
From: Waldo Bastian
Date: Wednesday, February 21st, 2001 at 21:50
Subject: [Kwrite-devel] Welcome to this mailinglist.
Hello,
Welcome to the kwrite development mailinglist. *test*test*
Cheers, Waldo
The journey
Like the first mail wanted, that list was very active for a long period of time.
The initial posters no longer are active in the project, but some people like me still stick around even after more than two decades.
A lot of important design decisions were discussed on the mailing list and many user questions got answered.
The end
The list traffic slowed down more and more over the last years even as the actual amount of contributions (and presumable the user base) did increase.
Reasons are for sure that for development, we use mostly our KDE GitLab instance for communication. It is just that easier to couple discussions with code there and link development issues to merge requests or commits. I can not remember any serious discussion on larger development topics outside our GitLab in the last years.
For users I assume mailing lists are just too arcane today. Perhaps that is a misconception I have, but at least from most people I know in real life, most of the online support questions went of to either websites or random other channels. Some people survive without any mail account beside the one needed to create some online accounts or install thei mobile phone.
I need to moderate away at least 10 to 100 spam mails for any real mail on the list, that is just a not needed overhead nobody should waste time with.
Therefore in the near future we will close that list, it will not get a 25 years birthday party :-)
But where to ask & discuss stuff now?
I already updated our documentation and web site to point to the current contact points.
In short:
Bug reports: like before - our KDE Bugzilla instance
User questions web site: use the Kate section on the KDE discourse server
User & developer questions chat: join our Kate Matrix channel
Development discussions and code: show up at our KDE GitLab instance
Many Kate developers and users are active on random social media and Co., too. But the above mentioned places are the ones that should be preferred.
Comments?
A matching thread for this can be found on r/KDE.