KDE Development – A Beginner's Guide

[OneLine]

http://dot.kde.org/2012/02/05/kde-de...eginners-guide

By: Rohan Garg

During a recent 5 day sprint, four KDE contributors planned and produced a handbook for beginning KDE developers...

...you can buy the book in print! Yes, you read that right, buy a physical copy of the book in dead tree format. Download the PDF or ePub file, or read it online at Flossmanuals...

[GreyGeek]

From the manual:

The KDE Philosophy

KDE's success is based on a world-view that we've found to be both practical and motivating. Elements of this development philosophy include-

Using available tools rather than re-inventing existing ones: Many of the basics you need to do your work are already part of KDE, such as the core libraries or Kparts, and are quite mature. So check out all available resources before trying to solve your own problem.


When making a suggestion, change we should.. to I will..: Grandiose plans are useless unless you are willing to put in the work to make them happen. You will find help once you start!


Improve code iteratively: Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Try a small solution, get it to work, and improve it through testing and refactoring to produce an excellent patch.

The KDE Community

The KDE development platform is created and maintained by an international team that cooperates on the development and distribution of free, open source software for desktop and portable computing. Our community has developed a wide variety of applications for communication, work, education, and entertainment. We have a strong focus on finding solutions to old and new problems, creating an open atmosphere for experimentation.


As a community, we value all contributions, and can use all member talents, including artwork, graphics, design, communication, translations, documentation, testing, bug-reporting and bug-hunting, system administration, and coding.

What makes KDE so exciting?

The best thing about KDE is our amazing community! We welcome new members, offering help and allowing people to experiment, learn and grow. This book is a part of that mission.

Our products are used by millions of home and office workers, and are being deployed in schools around the world. Brazil alone has over 50 million school children using KDE-based software to browse, learn and communicate! As a complement to Google Summer of Code, we run our own Season of KDE, where people take on the responsibility of working on a project intensively for the summer, and get a cool T-shirt at the end, in thanks. In 2011, we had 100 proposals! What an amazing community.

A complaint or criticism that I hear from Linux users who do not know how to code is that some programs crash. That's because developers are not perfect, so perfect code does not flow from their keyboard. It has long been part of the Open Source mantra that code is released early and often. The reason is so that you and I can test the code, file bug reports and make suggestions for improvements and wishes for additions. This way of coding is called the Baazar method, as apposed the the Cathedral method, terms created by Eric S. Raymond in his book "The Cathederal and the Baazar".
Google it.

[SecretCode]

From the manual:

Improve code iteratively: Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Try a small solution, get it to work, and improve it through testing and refactoring to produce an excellent patch.

My #1 gripe, or rather, source of unease with KDE is how the Plasma vision appears to be sucking developers' time and interests away from fixing bugs (at the KWin and Plasma Desktop level) and from implementing small but natural and widely-requested features.

As volunteers they have every right to focus on what they want to and pursue an exciting vision. But I'm not convinced the above is what the KDE (developer) community actually practices nowadays.

I know I should roll up my sleeves and do some paper-cut-fixing myself. But my sleeves are already rolled up if not worn through coping with the rest of my life!