[Kget] My Summer of Code Application draft

[Urs Wolfer]

On Wednesday 26 March 2008 23:58:57 Keith Bowes wrote:
> The Wiki says that I should write a draft and get it reviewed before
> submitting it.  I guess this list is the best way to do it.  The best
> way isn't listed.
>
> I'm sorry about this being in midweek.  I've had a terrible time
> getting the compiled programs to run.  I get these undefined symbols
> errors.  I finally figured it out, that it was using the included
> version of Qt instead of the Qt beta required by the SVN trunk
> (LD_LIBRARY_PATH in /etc/profile wasn't being set; go figure!), so I'm
> ready to apply and work on it now.
>
> A draft of my proposal follows:
> -----
> TITLE: Improving KGet
> ORGANIZATION: KDE
>
> ABSTRACT:
> To those of us in areas without high-speed Internet connections,
> download managers are practically an essential tool.  Downloading from
> browsers is doomed to failure, so a download manager helps alleviate
> the headache.  There are several download managers for Linux; in my
> opinion, KDE is the best, but it still lacks some helpful features
> that Windows download managers have.  I propose to implement those.
>
> DESCRIPTION:
> Here are the lacking features I want to implement:
> * Scheduling

Good point.

> * Rearranging download order by drag and drop

Also interesting, probably depends one the above one.

> * Implementing a cross-browser plugin (so we can use Firefox or Opera
> or whatever browser we prefer, since many download pages don't allow
> you to drag the link onto the drop target easily)

Sound interesting, but how want you to implement that?

> Segmented downloading is also hailed as a must-have feature, but I'll
> see if that's a feature that's worth implementing (and that I have
> time to do).  My ultimate goal is to make the best Linux download
> manager into something as good as the Windows equivalent.

KGet already has this feature in KDE 4.0.

> I think I'll be motivated to do this, because these are features that
> I want, but never went to check out the code, file bugs/enhancements,
> submit patches, etc.  But this gives me a great time to do this.
> Another reason I want to do this is to get some experience with C++.
> I have previously programmed in Object Pascal (so, I'm familiar with
> OOP and pointers) and C-like languages JavaScript and PHP, but have
> never done anything non-trivial in C++.

Okay. Good you know fundamental things already. But, you would really need to 
look into Qt before you can start implementing these things. Some of them need 
core changes in KGet. ;)

> A third reason this is exciting to me is that on my previous
> programming projects, I worked on an isolated area of the project.  In
> Lazarus (an open-source Delphi clone), I worked on the Windows API
> code (mostly mapping the class methods and properties to Windows API
> calls, translated from the GTK+ calls) and in last year's Summer of
> Code, I worked on a WordPress plugin (again, working mostly by myself,
> with occasional help from my mentor).  I think working on something
> like KGet will help me get into a more collaborative, team-based
> effort, not just where I'm doing my own thing in my special corner of
> the project.
> -----
>
> I guess that's all I have to say.  I know you're supposed to include a
> timeline, but to tell you the truth, I have no clue.  Based on
> previous experience, estimates are just dead wrong.  Seemingly small
> things can take a long time and seemingly big things can turn out to
> be easy.  So, I really don't know.

Nice, seems like you already have lots of different experiences. As I told 
you: please look into Qt example code (for example KGet code) to see how 
things exactly work.

If you want to talk about things, please join us in IRC: irc.freenode.org, 
#kget or write to our mailinglist: kget at kde.org.

Bye
urs
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