KMail development advice

[Daniel Vrátil]

On Friday, August 12, 2016 10:41:36 AM CEST Leonard Marquitan wrote:
> Greetings All,

Hi Leonard,
> 
> 
> I'm new to KDE development but for my university I was given the task to try
> and look into KMail and its ui, so as I struggle through the process of
> editing some toolbars or adding new windows I thought it would be best to
> ask here for some advice.

Don't worry, KMail is a huge beast, everyone struggles with it :-)

> 
> I built the whole kdepim project with QtCreator and looked briefly into
> everything and from the resources on the internet I get that the ui is
> defined via [name]ui.rc files.

Right, *ui.rc files defines only menus and toolbars and even then there is 
quite a lot of stuf "injected" from C++.

> However, editing those rc files (e.g. the
> kmcomposerui.rc) didn't do a thing after rebuilding. I saw that some ui is
> defined directly in the cpp files, but all my modification attempts were
> disappointing.

When editing *ui.rc files, you have to bump the "version" number at the very 
top, otherwise KXmlUi won't pick up the updated file.

There are also multiple identical ui.rc files that are used in different 
contexts, so maybe you did not edit the right one.

> 
> Is there anyone willing to provide me with some basic knowledge about the
> structure of the ui and the steps that are necessary for my aims?
>

Sure, feel free to ask here on the mailing list or stop by on #kontact IRC 
channel.

The UI of KMail is very complex and as you probably found its split over 
multitude of files as well as several different repositories, so it's hard to 
give you any specific advice. Can you be more specific about what you want to 
work on? It will make it easier for us to point you in the right place.

> Thank you in advance, I hope you can tolerate my inexperience.

No worries, thanks for your interest in Kontact!

Dan

> 
> Leonard


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-- 
Daniel Vrátil
www.dvratil.cz | dvratil at kde.org
IRC: dvratil on Freenode (#kde, #kontact, #akonadi, #fedora-kde)