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

Charting API for Financial Markets - JavaScript (SVG)

A brief about the released version of this API is available here . As a part of the last semester of my graduation program (Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology), I have been interning with a start-up, namely uTrade Solutions .  uTrade™ Solutions is a financial trading technology company with various products including multi-asset trading platform, algorithms and analytics. Instead of walking through my experience of working in a start-up, I would directly move to a short discussion about my project.  uTrade Solutions is working to develop a financial analytics portal and every financial analytics portal employs the use of advanced charting. To draw and display different types of charts on the web, there are two main options which are widely used and acknowledged. Namely, Adobe Flash and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) .  Using Adobe Flash has two main disadvantages: It requires the installation of an additional plugin to run content on t...
Post a Comment
Read more