[Kde-pim] Kontact Touch GSOC Project - mentor needed

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hey Michael,

On Thursday, April 11, 2013 23:36:38 Michael Bohlender wrote:
> @Sebas
> I didn't know OBS was that powerful. thanks for sharing. I will have to
> learn about OBS try to set it up.

OBS is a very powerful beast, and in terms of making the whole process from 
source code to device, I think it's quite unmatched. It takes a bit of 
learning, and in my experience, you'll end up having a few scripts that manage 
things for you, but most of the setup is already done, so you should be able 
to just pull packages out of the repos, maybe clone them in your home repo for 
the time being and have packages more or less rebuilt as you git push.

> "Would it then not be better to have someone from PA be the primary mentor
> for this?"
> 
> Thomas Pfeiffer is form PA but not a developer, so he can't be a Mentor I
> guess. The code I am intending to write will sure look a lot like what we
> have in plasma-mobile and declarative-plasmoids. I hang around in #active
> for some time now and feel comfortable working with the PA guys so I
> wouldn't mind getting mentored by one of them. But having someone with KDE
> PIM knowledge who makes you aware of possible performance problems and can
> help with questions regarding Akonadi is also really useful.
> 
> Any opinion from the PA developers on this?

Thomas would be a fine mentor, if he wants to do it. It doesn't mean that he 
can review all your code, but that's not the primary role of a mentor anyway, 
it's more a guide through your project. You can always get help with code 
questions on the Plasma and PIM lists, irc channels, etc. For code reviews, it 
would be cool if you can do your changes in an iterative way, i.e. come up 
with a plan, and then migrate component for component to your new UI. As 
Kontact Touch is already written in QML, that sounds feasible.

An interesting approach would be to just start changing a few delegates to 
using Plasma Components instead of the hand-rolled UI bits that Kontact Touch 
uses currently. This could make quite a huge difference already, and it's 
always nice to see visual results early on in the projects. It also gives a 
good way to learn to work with the code base, as you can start on fairly self-
contained smaller tasks, and work yourself up to overall workflow tasks that 
way.

The success of your project will, in any case, likely be expressed in terms of 
code lines removed, rather than added. :)

Good luck with your proposal,
-- 
sebas

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