"Cornelius's grand plan" - Merging KDElibs into Qt

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 2:18 PM, Matthias Fuchs <mat69 at gmx.net> wrote:
> Am Montag 01 November 2010, 11:53:01 schrieb Sean Harmer:
> [...]
>> One other thing that I have found that could be prohibiting wider adoption
>> of KDE as a development platform is the lack of coherent documentation.
>> Please do not take this as a criticism, techbase/userbase/api docs are all
>> excellent resources and are constantly improving. From experience of
>> trying to get some colleagues to utilise the KDE libraries who had not
>> been exposed to them before, a large hurdle was discoverability of the
>> APIs. A lot of the information is there it's just a question of finding
>> it. If information is difficult or time consuming to find this discourages
>> developers from coming back again or from branching out and using other
>> facilities in the future. I do not pretend to have the answers here. KDE
>> is a huge project and for the most part developed by volunteers and godo
>> documentation is very difficult and hugely expensive in terms of
>> time/blood/sweat/tears to write. Kudos to all the documentation writers
>> (and devs/artists/testers etc).
>
> I agree on that.
> I often don't know if something I try to do exists already in kdelibs and then
> you can see me asking on irc and fantastic people like dfaure answer me.
> Despite how great that has been for me this is really not a good path for a
> wider kdelibs adoption.
> Maybe a good overview website could help here. There the different classes are
> split into groups and you find out fast what they are for.
>
> Yeah writing such an overview will probably be very hard in itself, since
> kdelibs is very large.
> In that regard it is kinda "refreshing" -- but also demotivating since that
> issue has not been solved -- to see that we are not the only ones with such
> problems, e.g. imo boost faces the exact same problem. Boost is so large that
> it is quite hard to grasp what all you can do with it. And even if you know
> what you can do, often it is not clear if that would be a "good" -- e.g. fast
> -- path to go.
>

There is a *huge* need of:

a) a book (and a good one, not just a few tutorials like the ones in
Techbase) on how to develop applications with KDE
b) a huge improvement in the apidox. Take a look to
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest , then take a look at
http://api.kde.org. The difference is abysmal.

My proposal: KDE eV hires 2 persons to work for 1 year on these two
tasks. Book is made available on-line for free, and also on paper (I
like dead tree better :-) If the experience is successful, maybe KDE
could have a permanent "apidox janitor" (paid) position. Could someone
in the eV please send this proposal to the proper list/board/whatever?

-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)