KDE Launches A Distribution Outreach Program

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Launches A Distribution Outreach Program

With the Plasma 5.6 beta out the door, the KDE development community has today announced the formation of a Distribution Outreach Program...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Distribution-Outreach

[k1l_]

Seems like some from KDE realized what a mess there is. With KDE.neon, beeing a pita for stable release distributions and the usual KDE communication style (he, someone even cares about their KDE CoC?) . While the KDE hate gang is still publicly flaming everyone who says that decisions and communications are bad.

[DarkCloud]

And while your at it, how about an outreach to developers who may want to contribute in some small or large way to KDE. Right or wrong it seems like a very exclusive club to join. The instructions and help for getting started just to build KDE from GIT are out there but a lot of old and outdated information is also out there that obscures how to work and develop for KDE

[zanny]

And while your at it, how about an outreach to developers who may want to contribute in some small or large way to KDE. Right or wrong it seems like a very exclusive club to join. The instructions and help for getting started just to build KDE from GIT are out there but a lot of old and outdated information is also out there that obscures how to work and develop for KDE

If you want to help develop in KDE I think using Arch is invaluable. Pretty much everything has a -git pkgbuild in the AUR, so you can grab whatever you want to work on, build it, and use it as a daily driver extremely easily compared to trying to do it on Kubuntu-CI.

At that, KDE is moving to phabricator for everything. So if you want to contribute without the headaches of the old bug tracker / git repo management / tasks infrastructure go to phabricator.kde.org.

It is in no way an exclusive club, though. Make a feature request for what you want to improve and submit patches. If you are working on a popular enough project you will get feedback, problem in KDE is a lot of repos are dead from losing their maintainers and the day job devs who work on KDE are stuck with dozens of repos between each of them.

[wodencafe]

And while your at it, how about an outreach to developers who may want to contribute in some small or large way to KDE. Right or wrong it seems like a very exclusive club to join. The instructions and help for getting started just to build KDE from GIT are out there but a lot of old and outdated information is also out there that obscures how to work and develop for KDE

This.

There is a huge barrier of entry to getting started with KDE development, and after looking around on the forums for where one might actually get started, the only consistent answer I discovered was "Find a Mentor".

This is wrong, developers with the desire and capability to contribute should not have to hunt down a "Mentor" (especially one that isn't busy contributing or mentoring someone else) just to fix some bugs or implement some features in KDE.

Also their active contributors have a bad case of "Not my problem", perhaps because they are so busy.

[DarkCloud]

If you want to help develop in KDE I think using Arch is invaluable. Pretty much everything has a -git pkgbuild in the AUR, so you can grab whatever you want to work on, build it, and use it as a daily driver extremely easily compared to trying to do it on Kubuntu-CI.

At that, KDE is moving to phabricator for everything. So if you want to contribute without the headaches of the old bug tracker / git repo management / tasks infrastructure go to phabricator.kde.org.

It is in no way an exclusive club, though. Make a feature request for what you want to improve and submit patches. If you are working on a popular enough project you will get feedback, problem in KDE is a lot of repos are dead from losing their maintainers and the day job devs who work on KDE are stuck with dozens of repos between each of them.

Thank's for the info concerning phabricator.kde.org, I never knew about that. However that site is rather raw with information. In my perfect world, there would be a page "Building and Developing For KDE".

On another note, with KDE 4 there was a script that would build you a hello world template for various kinds of kde applications (widget, plasmoid, etc). It was really nice. Does that still exist in the KDE5 world. The name of the script eludes me, does anyone know of it and it's status in KDE5

[anda_skoa]

Easiest way is to use kdesrc-build as it does the checkout and building: https://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Sta...cripted_Builds

And the template generator you are thinking of is most likely KAppTemplate, part of kdesdk: https://projects.kde.org/projects/kd...k/kapptemplate

Cheers,
_

[zanny]

This.

There is a huge barrier of entry to getting started with KDE development, and after looking around on the forums for where one might actually get started, the only consistent answer I discovered was "Find a Mentor".

This is wrong, developers with the desire and capability to contribute should not have to hunt down a "Mentor" (especially one that isn't busy contributing or mentoring someone else) just to fix some bugs or implement some features in KDE.

Also their active contributors have a bad case of "Not my problem", perhaps because they are so busy.

You can contribute to KDE projects like any open source project. You write code, you submit patches on the bugtracker / mailing list / repo management (depending on the project its either on bugs.kde.org or phabricator) and you go through some iterations with the maintainers and commit contributors to get it merged.

The only thing KDE is really missing is merge requests, but that is mostly due to their choice of phabricator (and their old tools) over gitlab.- phabricator just does not support the fork / merge workflow in-client, though you can use git-request-pull against the mailing lists. But it is intentional rather than a lacking feature.

Getting a project into KDE, or getting commit rights is a bit more complicated, but the workflow is the same - write code and contribute it, and once you contribute enough you get commit rights.

[stikonas]

Getting a project into KDE, or getting commit rights is a bit more complicated, but the workflow is the same - write code and contribute it, and once you contribute enough you get commit rights.

Well, you only need commit rights if you want to submit at least a few patches (if you just want to send a single patch and forget about the project you definitely don't need commit access). And after 3 or so patches somebody would definitely sponsor your request for commit rights. So it's not THAT complicated... And patch does not have to be code patch. It can be e.g. translations or some other contribution...

[Zoll]

There is a huge barrier of entry to getting started with KDE development, and after looking around on the forums for where one might actually get started, the only consistent answer I discovered was "Find a Mentor".

KDE is a big eco system. Do you want to work on Frameworks? on Plasma? on KDE applications? Find which one is interesting to you and contact that specific team. Usually, they have instructions on how to contribute. You can use KDE Review Board to submit patches if you don't have commit access.