KDE Core/Platform 11/Developer Story
< KDE Core | Platform 11
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- Guides for all distributions how to build KDE are outdated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)