A forward look at KDE4 (was: "A look at GNOME 2.14...")

[Philip Rodrigues]

> Believe me, if I had the skills, I would absolutely LOVE to submit tons of
> patches and code to KDE. But I'm no coder. But I try to help in other ways.
> And my help does not include patches. Does it mean that my help is less
> appreciated?

Well, Aaron answered this much better than I could, but I should just clarify 
that I didn't in any way mean to suggest that you can only contribute to KDE 
by coding. I consider myself a "KDE contributor", and in the 5 or so years 
I've been contributing, I've never written a line of code - many others are 
in the same position. The point I was trying to make is that *doing* is much 
more valuable than *talking*. That "doing" need not necessarily be "writing 
the code." 

Here are some things off the top of my head that are valuable to KDE but 
aren't coding:
* Writing docs
* Writing whatsthis help
* Bug triage (*very* useful!)
* Writing promo articles
* Working on websites
* Translation
* Artwork
* User technical support
No doubt there are many things that I've missed out there, but that's a 
taster.

I'd also like to repeat what Aaron said about learning to code - none of the 
KDE coders came out of the womb writing C++, they all learnt. That's not to 
say that we all can, or should (I haven't), but if you want to contribute 
code, it doesn't become impossible just because you haven't spent the last 20 
years learning the difference between <insert two complicated coding terms 
here>.

I have some ideas about ways to help features get implemented/bugs get fixed 
without writing the code yourself, but I'll leave that for another message, 
if anyone's interested.

Regards,
Philip
-- 
KDE Documentation Team: http://i18n.kde.org/doc
KDE Documentation Online: http://docs.kde.org
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