KDE Gardening 2025
The KDE community created in the last decades a lot of interesting projects.
Unfortunately, not all projects survive the test of time, be it because the developers leave or technology moves on and stuff gets less relevant.
The same happens for our communication channels or web sites. 20 years ago, mailing lists and IRC were still kind of common place, today more people hang around on stuff like discuss.kde.org or in our Matrix channels.
Unfortunately our community is not that good at cleaning dead stuff up or deciding that the zombie state of some things hurt.
Dead Web Sites
A no longer updated website might be a small issue, that just looks bad, but most people will see that stuff with news from 2010 will likely be not alive.
Still, I think it makes sense to remove such sites and just redirect them (if there is any follow up information online).
It is no good state if we have stuff up that rots away since a few years, at least if it contains no other valuable info, like documentation or howtos.
Zombie Git Projects
Worse than dead web sites are zombie Git repositories that still get merge requests but nobody takes a look as all people are just gone but the stuff is not clearly marked as archived.
People waste their time and will likely be upset their contributions are not even looked at.
If a project is really dead, that should be archived, one can still resurrect it with easy later on, it is not gone, just clearly marked as dead.
Blackhole Mailing Lists
Even worse are in my eyes dead mailing lists.
People will drop questions there, in worst case that will even already hang for days in moderation or then forever without answer on the list.
That turns away people, you have a question or contribution and it ends in a black hole? No good first contact.
Solutions? Gardening!
What can we do?
We not just need to create new stuff and maintain what we have, we need to do some house cleaning or gardening.
We did that in the past, we can do it again :)
If you want to help, or just turn up and tell that your old project, web site or list it dead, show up on one of these issues:
Discussion
Feel free to join the discussion at the KDE reddit.