Some feedback from an anonymous new user/devel

[Valorie Zimmerman]

Hi folks, some friends on another network were asking about KDE
development, and basically googling around. When I got online, I asked
for specifics when there was some grousing about finding relevant
information. Here's what I got:

    A newbies review of the plasma 5 tutorial.

    Goal: Figure out how to write a widget in Plasma 5, ideally with
C++ component(s).

    Cursory searching leads here:

    https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Plasma

    Plasma 4 tutorial is good. Covers C++ and QML, works fine.

    Plasma 5 tutorial has some issues:

    1. CMake explanation is incomplete

    a. There is a pointer to a CMake tutorial for more information,
but this tutorial
       only has KDE4 examples, and doesn't show what needs to be done
for KF5 / Plasma 5

    - Overall I found all the CMake stuff *very* confusing for Plasma 5 / KF5.
      Most of the easily found stuff seemed to cover KDE4.
      Is there anywhere where the following aspects are all mentioned?

      1. The ECM, include, and find_package lines from this blog post:
          http://www.proli.net/2014/06/21/porting-your-project-to-qt5kf5
      2. plasma_install_package, and what it's arguments mean in relation to the
         plasmoid's directory structure
      3. The different components that can be passed to
         find_package(KF5) or find_package(Qt5) and how they map onto
CMake stuff
         like KF5::ConfigCore or KF5::Plasma
      4. A simple working example of a CMakeFile.txt and directory structure for
         a Plasma 5 widget
         (Pointer into source tree would be fine here, as a newbie I
sometimes don't
          even think to check for)

    b. Currently in the plasma 5 tutorial the CMakeLists.txt example
code only shows
       one line:

           plasma_install_package(tutorial org.kde.tutorial
plasma/plasmoids applet)

       as above this is very incomplete, and won't work out of the box.
       Furthermore I'm not sure the text in plasma_install_package lines up with
       the rest of the tutorial.

    c. A pointer to some place describing how plasma_install_package
and other CMake
       odds and ends work would be nice
       I looked a bit on the API site but couldn't find anything easily.
    d. Finally a pointer to a relatively straightforward widget from the source
       would also be nice. As a newbie it's easy to forget that I can
pull down the source
       tree for examples.

    2. What is the plasma-shell mentioned in the tutorial? I don't
have a executable
       of that name on my system (fedora), and I don't see how running
it without
       any arguments could be used to test a widget.

    3. That's all the major issues I had I guess. I'm still trying to figure out
       how the heck QML and C++ work seperately and together, but that
will need a
       lot of reading and tinkering on my part.

When there is some breathing room, a documentation sprint might be
good? Or recruit someone to work on this? During the Doc workshop at
Akademy one of the problems we pinpointed was how confusing the wall
of text is when one looks for tutorials. I would love to help out, but
I think that those who know what of the Plasma 4 stuff is still useful
and what should just be tagged as "KDE4" and archived have to move
that useless stuff first, so that the decks are cleared a bit.

Anyway, this email is from a coder new to KDE, and me, not a coder.
I'll continue to work to get this anonymous user of techbase to become
a contributor to techbase and our codebase as well.

Valorie

-- 
http://about.me/valoriez