Problems getting into programming

[Thomas McGuire]

Hello,

First of all I want to say that the articles on quality.kde.org are 
really great! Thanks to them, I managed to set up my CVS KDE 
without any problems at all (apart from the very long download 
times thanks to my 56K modem).

However, I have the feeling that some parts are missing in the 
article, so here are my questions that are unanswered for me.
I hope you can help me with my problems, and please also consider 
updating the articles on the website to make the life of other 
newbies easier.

How often should I update my CVS repository ? 
I suspect that the most bandwidth comes from comparing the files, 
not from downloading updates. 
I really do not want to spend 1MB on comparing files when the 
downloaded updates only contain 10KB.
If I had a DSL connection, this wouldn't be a problem, but with my 
modem, an update takes quite some time.

How do I actually WORK with my local CVS repository?

Should I simply modify some lines of code, then 
run ./module-build.sh (which will probably take hours), start a new 
KDE session and test if all behaves like I intended ?
Or should I just go to the directory and do make; make install?
This would of course be MUCH faster, since the above script allways 
rebuilds the whole module, but it seems to be still not very 
practical.
Will a "make install" from a subdirectory (e.g. kdebase/konqueror) 
succeed?

How do I work with KDevelop? Most apps do not have a .kdevelop file 
(which is a shame), so do I have to import a makefile-based 
project?
Since this creates some KDevelop-related files, should I keep a 
backup of the folder I am working on?
If KDevelop succeeds in compiling the project, will it first install 
the files to ~/kde-unstable or does it only put the files somewhere 
in the build directory (or does it mess up with the makefile and 
and places the bins and libs in the CVS tree?)?
If it does not install the files, is it possible to run and debug 
the app from within this build directory?
Will there be conflicts if I have for example Konqueror installed in 
~/kde-unstable, and an other Konqueror, this time modified by me, 
started from KDevelop (from the build dir)? Which libs will "my" 
Konqueror use? The proper ones in the build dir, or the ones in my 
installation dir (~kde-unstable)? I am asking this especially 
because I previously tried to make some modifications (just for 
testing, noting serious) to kdegraphics/kghostview and had had 
troubles with my modifications not being shown because they were in 
some libs, which were not used.

So this are pretty general questions, now the thing wich I want to 
do:
I want to change Konqueror to display "in new tab" instead of "in 
new window" in the statusbar when using tabbed browsing and 
pointing the mouse over a link.
IMHO the actual changes in the code are no real problem, but the 
rest is. I would like to use KDevelop for this if possible.
How would you do this (setting up KDevelop, building, debugging and 
all the other things mentioned above)?

Also I think the site (quality.kde.org) should be more visible. It 
is a great site for beginners to learn about how to contribute to 
KDE, but who knows he has to follow a link with 'quality' in it?
I did not see any links in developer.kde.org to here, and only one 
link on kde.org, together with many others like usability.
I really think this situation should improve.

I know that I could answer some of the questions myself by just 
experimenting a bit, but I have the feeling that many others have 
similar questions, so I also wanted to point out which parts are 
missing on the quality site.

Oh, and maybe you could correct any mistakes I made in the mail - it 
is the only way my English will improve.

Thanks a lot,
Thomas