Last week I arrived on a rainy Thursday evening in Berlin to attend the KDE Frameworks Kickoff sprint. The next three days were spent with discussions and ideas about the future of the libraries that are the base of most of the software of the KDE Community.

After arriving at MBition GmbH on Friday we started with reviewing the policies that were in place the last few years for KDE Frameworks 5. This includes for example the release model or on which Qt version to depend. After lunch David Edmundson and Eike Hein gave talks about the KDE community in general and about the advantages using KDE Frameworks libraries can bring to the employees at MBition. In the afternoon that the discussion switched from the past to the future and our goals and design principles that we have in mind for KDE Frameworks 6. Later we already outlined problems with specific frameworks and how our goals will impact them.

After a needed dose of sleep Saturday started right where Friday left off. We split in small groups to investigate how our design goals (further simplification of dependencies, seperation of UI and logic and seperation of framework and implementation) would influence each library and what has to be done to achieve those goals. To this end each group discussed a single library at a time and after eight libraries in total the results were presented to the whole group. For this we started with the Tier 3 Frameworks which have the most complicated dependencies (Tier 1 Frameworks only depend on Qt).

On Sunday morning only two Tier 3 libraries were left, KXmlGui and KIO. It took the whole group (including David Faure who attended the sprint remotely via a video call) the entire morning to also sort these out. I had to leave after lunch but others continued to work turning their attention to Tier 2 Frameworks to also clean those up.

The result of these three very productive but exhausting days is this massive workboard. Thanks to everyone who attended this sprint and made it so that we could get this much done. Many tasks can already be done now and don’t have to wait for Qt 6 or KF 6 branching. If you are intrested in helping out, just pick one from the workboard! If you need help or have some comments just ask on IRC/webchat or directly on phabricator. If you want to learn more about the sprint look at Christoph’s blog who wrote a quick recap each day. More summaries can be found at Kevin’s, Kai Uwe’s, Volker’s and and Nicolas’ blogs. Special thanks to MBition who kindly hosted us and KDE e.V. for travel support and accommodation!