new in the list

[Adriaan de Groot]

[Cross-posting to the lists where these questions appeared *and* kde-devel for 
general development information; CC'ed to the two original authors.]

Hi Anderson, hi Dino,

On Thursday 04 May 2006 19:48, Anderson Fonseca wrote:
> my name is Anderson and I am new in the list.
> I would like help in the developing KDE, but I'm a little bit lost as start
> and where help.

On Thursday 04 May 2006 09:28, Dino wrote:
> I would like to contribute... in a variety of diffrent ways...
> art, documents, and help files...


As others have already pointed out, two possible starting points are:

http://quality.kde.org/develop/howto/howtohack.php
http://www.kde.org/jobs/


I recently wrote this to another person who was asking to help:

	If you are interested in programming (really, KDE code is 
	not rocket science; if you can write some basic C++ you 
	can get by; heck, we even *taught* a guy C++ while he 
	was adding email-validation functions to Kontact), then there 
	are "Junior Jobs" which are small bugs or little features that 
	can be added fairly easily and where an application maintainer 
	has said he or she would be willing to do a little mentoring. 
	You can find the JJ's on bugs.kde.org [1].

	If you are interested in documenting things, then there are the 
	API documents [2] [3] which always need work. It can be useful 
	to read them and fix them up a little while learning to program.

	The websites are always looking for content and editors and 
	people who really want to get the message about KDE out. 
	For instance, Kontact.org is rather lacking in user information; 
	pim.kde.org is the developer site and could use better links to 
	existing developer.kde.org and quality.kde.org information.

	SpreadKDE.org has a task list and is a good place to start looking.

	> It would be great if someone 
	> would be able to point in the general direction of what i could do to
	> start helping, or if someone needs help on something their working on.

	General directions, see above. Specific things .. hm. I'm always 
	a little reluctant to give them because I would name things 
	that *I* find interesting or useful; those are my itches, 
	not necessarily yours.

	[1] 
http://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=JJ%3A&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED
	[2] http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/3.5-api.php
	[3] http://www.englishbreakfastnetwork.org/apidocs/


Of course, there are more ways to get involved. Documentation starts at 
http://docs.kde.org/ for the user manuals. If you want to contribute to 
those, you just write text (in plain english, no markup at all) and send it 
to the documentation team. If you want to help out on the documentation 
markup front, take a look at the EBN's Docs Sanitizer [4] which tells you 
what's technically wrong with the documentation. For artwork, start at 
kde-artists.org. So Dino needs to be over there; Anderson needs more 
coding-type contribution help. Is this enough?

[4] http://www.englishbreakfastnetwork.org/sanitizer/

Another place to do development-type work is in the bugs database -- pick a 
bug, check if it still happens, comment on it. This might not be very much 
*fun*, though, if your primary motivation is to create things.


One thing about KDE is that most contributors are pretty busy. It's hard to 
answer questions like "what should I do?" because then we need to take time 
to think about what needs doing, consider persons abilities at various tasks, 
plan, manage, etc. That's not what we really want to do. So instead of 
*asking* what to do, just *do* something! Nothing brightens my day -- and I 
believe I can speak for many KDE developers -- more than a patch. It doesn't 
need to be a technically perfect patch to the code, any document that carries 
the message "There was something wrong and I have fixed it, here's how:" is a 
valuable one.

So, get out there, find something that "isn't quite right" and do something 
about it.


[ade]

PS. We know that the getting started information is fragmented. Another good 
job would be to hunt down all the different "getting started at coding" pages 
and consolidate them (I'd say to developer.kde.org). Will Entriken started 
recently:

	So far I have found these sites explaining how to build and/or port to
	KDE trunk:
	http://developer.kde.org/build/compile_cvs.html
	http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE3To4
	http://edu.kde.org/development/port2kde4.php
	http://quality.kde.org/develop/cvsguide/buildstep.php

Will found the instructions from the edu site the most accurate -- but all 
this is for KDE4.


-- 
These are your friends - Adem
    GPG: FEA2 A3FE Adriaan de Groot
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