Suggestion for Konquerer developers and delivering "stripped" releases

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 10 November 2006 14:37, Kimberly Lazarski wrote:
> And when it comes to "RTFM" I'd like to mention there is precious little
> documentation for KDE's back end for users and admin types to RTFM. What
> is the structure of the configuration/rc/preference files? How are the
> sessions stored and how can one fix a corrupt one?

http://kde.org/areas/sysadmin

not comprehensive, not the best, etc. but somewhat existent at least. and 
better yet, completely hidden!

no, wait, that's not a good thing. strike that, take two:

and even worse, it's almost completely hidden from view!

;)

> I've searched for specs and can't find any. Sure, one could download the
> source and read it, but KDE is a humongous project, not one which
> someone can absorb the architecture and read through in a day. I'd love

there are a lot of people who have this knowledge or knows where it can be 
found. many of those people are here on this list.

what those of us who have this knowledge are really, really, really bad at 
doing is writing it down. ('why' this is would be another several paragraphs 
of discussion =) kde needs people who are passionate about discovering the 
secrets of kde and recording that knowledge. in short, we need scribes.

i, and i'm certain there are others, would be more than abundantly happy to 
share my scraps of insight into the inner workers of things with those who 
would write them out and organize what is out there into something coherent.

i'm also willing to commit to ensuring that those people are given an equal 
position within the meritocracy of kde.

but for some reason we don't seem to find these people. i'm not sure why 
precisely, but then i haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it either so 
maybe the answer is -really- obvious. we're not the only ones with this 
problem though, as qim from gnome blogged about this same problem in their 
project.

in short: if you're willing to take on an online book project to fix the 
problem of searching and not being able to find information, be it for 
developers or users, i'm willing to help hook you up with sources.

i'm aseigo on irc.freenode.net .. you can find me in #kde-devel among other 
places.

> By responding I wasn't intending to put anyone on the defensive or
> anything like that, but to convey that this is the kind of attitude that
> OSS project members need to take care to avoid,

agreed. at the same time remember that this list is, so to speak, the bear's 
den. it's not recommended to run into the cave where the bear sleeps, scream 
at it and then get all upset when it mauls you. =)

i see opportunity for growth on all sides here, including the community of 
users who choose to get involved in various ways. we all have things to learn 
(such as: talking about regression test suites to the khtml people is ironic 
because they probably have one of the most extensive test suites in the 
project) and to contribute.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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