I'd like to contribute... - a KDevelop -question

[Tuomas Nurmi]

Hi!

I've used KDE for years and been following many of the mailing lists for quite 
some time now. I have some experience from C and java programming and I've 
been lately studying C++ and QT4. I'm most interested in koffice development 
(yes, I've been following it quite keenly lately) and the major problem I 
have had is:

I have NO experience what so ever of IDEs or auto* / CMake. In my projects I 
have compiled from the the command line using manually produced header files 
and Makefile.

I've been trying to use KDevelop, and while I am able to start some simple 
projects, I seem to be unable to use it to compile anything from the svn or 
from various tarballs. (SVN is another mystery to me (I have no CVS 
experience either) but following the instructions I have been able to 
download something and sometimes get it compiled with the CLI.)

So, I would like some advice as of how to use KDevelop and tips on what kind 
of practises would be good. To start with, where to put the source, how to 
document, how to build... I have read documentation on these, but it seems 
that as the practises and technology has evolved the documentation has become 
a bit inconsistent / outdated in these parts.

I use gentoo system, I'm also a fairly new gentoo user, I previously used 
debian based distrors, so some of my problems might be related to that.

Any ideas?-)