Wednesday, December 27, 2006

API documentation & refactored kdelibs/kdeui

During the last weeks/days the directory structure of especially kdelibs/kdeui got a major overhaul: in KDE 3 all files of a module were in the same directory which was more or less a mess as you did not know immediately which files belonged to the same category. kdelibs/kdeui in KDE4 has a rather clean structure now (similar to the one in Qt) by using subfolders like
  • actions
  • dialogs
  • widgets
  • xmlgui
  • several others...
Compare this to KDE3's kdelibs/kdeui structure. For KDE4 this is a huge benefit, as we have clearly defined groups. We already had lots of discussions in the past about API documentation and this is exactly where the new structure is important: In Qt every class usually belongs to a group (example). Our API documentation tool doxygen of course supports grouping, and now it is even easy to know which class should be in which group. For instance, all classes in the widgets directory should be in the 'Widgets' group, and then maybe even more fine-grained divided into sub-groups.
By the way, we have a policy that every widget in kdelibs has a screenshot to immediately see how it looks like - another nice way to get involved :)
All in all this is really awesome and I'd like to thank all involved developers. Next prey is kdelibs/kdecore? =)

Friday is developer wiki day

Some time ago we started to migrate our developer.kde.org pages to a mediawiki based solution at techbase.kde.org. In order to give the wiki a big boost we always meet on fridays on irc.kde.org #kde-www. This friday we will continue to migrate content, besides that we want to find a roadmap and a target date at which we can turn off the old developer pages.
To make this friday an even greater success we need as many volunteers as possible joining us. It is also a nice opportunity to get in touch with the KDE community - we are happy about every new face and - believe us - we don't eat anyone :)

Monday, December 25, 2006

God Jul

I'm back in Germany after my stay in Sweden. All in all, it was an awesome time. I also traveled to the north to a town called Kiruna (indeed starting with a 'K' =) and you probably guess what I found there: snow, lots of snow. To give you an impression here are two images :)That are nice pictures for the current time of year, so God Jul to everyone and KDE :)

Friday, December 15, 2006

developer wiki

Now it's kind of official: The first blog about our new developer wiki by Aaron. I'm very happy the wiki gets more attention, and in fact this is a very good opportunity to get started with KDE. As Aaron already mentioned we want the wiki to become a first class citizen for KDE related developer resources. The main task right now is to port pages from the "old" developer pages to the new wiki. At the same time we can restructure the pages like moving KDE 2 and KDE 3 related content to own pages etc. As it is a wiki, everyone is welcome to help. If you want to get in touch with us join us in irc (irc.kde.org, #kde-www)!
Some time ago I wrote a small perl script with which you can convert the html code of the old developer pages to wiki syntax. It's not perfect, but speeds up the process of porting a page tremendously :)