[kde-doc-english] Sec: Unclassified After some work

[Carlos Leonhard Woelz]

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 00:38:52 +1000, "Stoffers, Robert AC"
<Robert.Stoffers at defence.gov.au> said:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm wanting to help out the KDE Documentation Team, however, upgrading
> regularly to development versions of KDE over my dialup connection would
> be
> painful to say the least. I read on the getting started page that third
> party KDE-based application developers could use a bit of help, can
> anyone
> give me some more information?

Sure. There are many modules and applications in KDE that do not require
compiling the whole KDE, just the involved module or application,
because they stay compatible with the latest stable kdelibs. Most of the
applications in kde-extragear modules, kdepim and kdewebdev are in this
situation. Fot these apps, you can use the KDE 3.3 packages provided by
your distribution, and compile and install only the module or
application. The time required compiling and updating the sources is
much smaller. (I am on dial up too).

To know how to compile a single module form CVS, please follow the
"single module strategy" of the CVS step by step guide at:
http://quality.kde.org/develop/cvsguide/buildstep.php

If you don't want to compile anything at all, there are a couple of KDE
apps which have a very stable interface, but outdated docs. For these
apps, it is not required to use the latest CVS version. One example good
example is KNode (the KDE news reader, which is also part of Kontact,
usually distributed as part of the kdepim package).
BTW, you can see the status of the kdepim documentation here:
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Quality+Team+KDE+PIM

> I am still learning how DocBook works,
> though
> it seems simple enough (I have been coding HTML for a few years). 

Oh, you will find it easy if you have HTML experience. Please use the
doc-primer as reference for KDE docs:

http://i18n.kde.org/doc/doc-primer

Quanta is a very nice docbook editor, even if it is mainly a web
development tool. If you are a web developer, you may find the interface
familiar. You can get a kde docbook specific toolbar here:
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=16281

> Also, I noticed there isn't a link to the kde-doc-english mailing list on
> the KDE mailing list page! To subscribe, I had to craft my own URL to get
> to
> the right page.

Oh, I don't have access to my computer right now, but if nobody else
does, I will fix it this weekend. Thanks for reporting it.

Any other question you may have, please feel free to ask. With your web
development background I am sure you are a valuable addition to the
documentation team. Welcome.

Cheers,

Carlos Woelz
-- 
  Carlos Leonhard Woelz
  carloswoelz at imap-mail.com