Skip to main content

Beginner's Guide to KDE Development



 Google Summer of Code Doc Camp Sprint October, 2011



    The Doc Camp was held at the Google HQ in Mountain View, California ; it consisted of 2 major components - an unconference and 3-5 short form Book Sprints to produce 'Quick Start' guides for specific GSoC projects. The unconference explored topics proposed by the participants. Many topics on free documentation of free software were proposed for discussion during the event. Each Quick Start Sprint brought together 5-8 individuals to produce a book on a specific GSoC project. The Quick Start books were launched at the opening party for the GSoC Mentors summit immediately following the event.

    Four free software projects (KDE, OpenStreetMap, OpenMRS, and Sahana Eden) had each sent three to five contributors to write books about the projects this week. The KDE team consisted of four members , namely Karan , Rohan , Valorie and yours truly. A book in a week was an amazing achievement, whether for a free software projects or a publisher. In fact, the first day and last day of the sprint were unconferences, so there were only three days for actual writing.


   The books are never really finished at the end of the sprint, even though they go up for viewing and for sale immediately. This doesn't detract from the value of the material produced. It just means they need to be followed up by either successive sprints or updating and adding at regular intervals. Books that come from sprints are also quite short. I think a typical length is 125 pages, growing over time as follow-up sprints are held. The length also depends of course on the number of people working on the sprint which was four in our case. So we got in to the process of creating a mix of fresh writing and copying material from the official KDE docs. The latter required some editing and polish to blend in with the book. Our team's focus on developer documentation spared us the open-ended discussions over scope that the other teams had to undergo. But at key points during the writing, we still were forced to examine passages that appeared too hurried and unsubstantiated. At each point we had to determine what the hidden topics were, and then whether to remove all references to them or to expand them into new chapters of their own .

     The KDE book is fairly standard developer documentation, albeit a beginner's guide with lots of practical advice about working in the KDE environment with the community. Our book, Beginning KDE Development, was created with the GSoC students in mind, to help them get up and running KDE trunk, if necessary, as quickly as possible. Along with the technical helps, we've also discussed the KDE community, where to get help, and how to communicate -- all in one short book. I hope you will visit http://flossmanuals.net/kde-guide/, create an account, and help us make it better!



The Team:
Karan Pratap Singh    email: wizard.karan@gmail.com                  irc-nick: kpsfoo
Rohan Garg               email: rohan16garg@gmail.com                   irc-nick: shadeslayer
Valorie Zimmerman   email: valorie.zimmerman@gmail.com        irc-nick: valorie
Supreet Pal Singh       email: supreetpal@gmail.com                      irc-nick: supreet

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nouveau - Summer Project

Implementing a software scripting engine on Fermi to achieve safe memory re-clocking. Fermi stands for Nvidia GPUs based on Fermi architecture. NVidia cards have long had the possibility to reclock at least some of the engines of its GPUs. Up to the geforce 7 (included), reclocking used to happen at boot time and usually didn't involve memory reclocking at all. It changed with geforce 8 (nv50) where almost all laptops got the capability to reclock both the VRAM and the main engines. This was introduced in order to lower power consumption when the GPU was mostly idle. The default boot clocks were usually in some intermediate state between the slowest and the fastest clocks. The reclocking process for these cards is mostly understood and Nouveau is not far from being safely reclock on the fly, even while gaming. Geforce 200 (nva3) introduced load-based reclocking on all the cards. This started being a real problem because the default boot clocks are a third to a half of the ...
4 comments
Read more

Getting Started with Open Source Projects

Fellow Open-source Enthusiasts Going to conferences is great , getting inspired by attending them is even better but you know what is better? Getting to attend conferences [National/International] for free , getting cool stickers and t-shirts being delivered at your place , being one of the first few to get your hands on a developer device or developer release of an upcoming software/OS and all this for free! I will hopefully be pardoned by true open-source enthusiasts for making this look like an advertisement rather than a motivator but I somehow couldn't resist.  Now , ignoring the above perks because they are 'perks' , the real deal is getting to learn while you work. Being involved with any open-source project brings along a great deal of learning , experience and contribution to real-time projects which people around the globe use in their daily lives. Once you are into development and learning , conferenc...
3 comments
Read more

uCharts - Financial Charting API

A few months back, the first stable release of the charting API, that I have been working on was released. A part of the uTrade product portfolio, it has been aptly named uCharts. uCharts is a general purpose charting API with prime focus on financial markets and data. In this post, I will give a brief overview of the features, compatibility and scope of extensions. Features The API currently supports 6 types of charts: Line Area CandleStick OHLC Bar Pie It has been designed in a manner that all aspects of the charts are user defined. Starting from the color of the charts, width of the candle bars till the number of ticks on each axis. Mentioning each element seems like a futile exercise. However, brushing over a few notable features seems more fruitful. Aggregation Formula The number of data points that can be displayed on a screen or inside a DIV is limited by its resolution. The number of pixels available can lead to a severe limitation especially ...
Post a Comment
Read more