KDE Core/Platform 11/Developer Story

Issues

• Compiling KDE, getting dependencies is difficult
• Setting up latest stuff is painfull (e.g. Plasma Active)
• Getting trunk development is hard
• Providing dependencies is a distribution's problem
• kdesourcebuild is more and more required
• Redmine should provide the dependencies
• Guides for all distributions how to build KDE are outdated
• Standard KDE way to access packages, using distribution-specific backends
• Two problems: Getting packages, setting up development environment
• Developing kioslaves or other stuff which needs to be installed is tricky, requires local environment paths setup or root to install modules
• Two different target groups: People working on KDE itself, libraries, core applications, which need development versions of libraries. Second group: application developer who work with stable release versions of libraries, 3rd party developers
• Documentation is hard to find
• Qualitiy of kdelibs is not always great
• Cross-platform can be an issue
• People just don't need what's in kdelibs

Target groups

• Newcomers
  • New applications, kioslaves, plasmoids
  • Modifiy existing applications and other componentns
• Develop KDE platform
• Develop KDE frameworks
• Qt-only developers

Tools

• Plasmate for Plasmoid development
• KDevelop for C++ development
• kde-examples git repo, integrate it with KDevelop, add metadata
• New user dashboard in KDevelop, guiding user. Templates have to be maintained, examples, can't be adapted.
• AbstractItemMode test from Qt examples
• Tools for testing kioslaves, kded modules, Akonadi agents
• CPAN for Qt, selection of independent Qt based libraries, start with collection of links, add metadata, provide tools to get packages, integrate with IDEs

Examples

Apple developer documentation

• Front page: What do you want to develop? (Could be our Techbase start page)
• Framework is not that easy, but documentation is very targeted and makes it easy (Qt documentation is still better)