Help on TechBase, KDE Community Forums

From time to time techbase readers ask questions in the associated talk pages, e.g. with regard to bugs in the tutorials. Usually, they get no reply. This is mainly because noone gets even noticed about this. I've added a link to the KDE Community Forum now on top of each techbase page (MediaWiki:sidenotice). Maybe this helps that developers new to KDE get more help. A little...

Compile Time

Recompiling kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase, kdesdk, kdeplasma-addons, playground/base/plasma all in all takes about 2h 13min on my t41p (1.7GHz, 1.5GB ram). It's still quite fast imo, but I imagine with today's hardware it's maybe 30 minutes? See below for detailed infos. I'm using mpyne's excellent kdesvn-build scripts to build KDE from trunk. I even believe this should be the default way for building trunk instead of the rough road we propose on techbase right now. Are there any reasons not to use kdesvn-build?

Building kdelibs (1/6)
       Preparing build system for kdelibs.
       Running cmake...
       Compiling, attempt 1...
       Build succeeded after 44 minutes, and 56 seconds.
       Installing kdelibs.
       Overall time for kdelibs was 48 minutes, and 49 seconds.

Building kdepimlibs (2/6)
       Preparing build system for kdepimlibs.
       Running cmake...
       Compiling, attempt 1...
       Build succeeded after 7 minutes, and 53 seconds.
       Installing kdepimlibs.
       Overall time for kdepimlibs was 8 minutes, and 14 seconds.

Building kdebase (3/6)
       Preparing build system for kdebase.
       Running cmake...
       Compiling, attempt 1...
       Build succeeded after 52 minutes, and 35 seconds.
       Installing kdebase.
       Overall time for kdebase was 57 minutes, and 44 seconds.

Building kdesdk (4/6) # note: several subdirs commented out
       Preparing build system for kdesdk.
       Running cmake...
       Compiling, attempt 1...
       Build succeeded after 8 minutes, and 26 seconds.
       Installing kdesdk.
       Overall time for kdesdk was 8 minutes, and 45 seconds.

Building kdeplasma-addons (5/6)
       Preparing build system for kdeplasma-addons.
       Running cmake...
       Compiling, attempt 1...
       Build succeeded after 6 minutes, and 15 seconds.
       Installing kdeplasma-addons.
       Overall time for kdeplasma-addons was 6 minutes, and 24 seconds.

Building plasma (6/6) # this is: playground/base/plasma
       Preparing build system for plasma.
       Running cmake...
       Compiling, attempt 1...
       Build succeeded after 3 minutes, and 25 seconds.
       Installing plasma.
       Overall time for plasma was 3 minutes, and 35 seconds.

Feature Plan on TechBase

The Planned Features list is up and running again. It just needs to be filled. If you are a KDE developer you should consider to add your planned features to the list :) There are three templates you can use:

• {{FeatureDone|project|description|email-address|first-name name}}
• {{FeatureInProgress|project|description|email-address|first-name name}}
• {{FeatureTodo|project|description|email-address|first-name name}}

Another todo-item now is to merge the old feature lists into techbase.

Growing articles on TechBase

Right now TechBase has content in 19 languages. Sometimes articles grow bigger over time. How to build KDE4 is the prefect example. Here is a list of pages about building KDE4 (not counting translations):

• Getting Started/Build/KDE4
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Arch Linux
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Ark Linux
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Cygwin
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Fedora
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/FreeBSD
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Gentoo
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Kubuntu and Debian
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Mac OS X
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Mac OS X 10.5 issues
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Mandriva
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Prerequisites
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Troubleshooting
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/3rd-party libraries
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/Building DBus
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/Building KDESupport Libraries
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/Building Qt 4
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/Environment
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/GCC And MinGW
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/Littlecms.patch
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/MS Visual Studio
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/MinGW Build Tips
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/Windows Vista
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/additional libraries
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/emerge
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/kdesvn-build
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4/openSUSE
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4 Alpha 1
• Getting Started/Build/KDE4 Alpha 2

That makes 30 pages. Some thoughts about this. Splitting up articles makes translation more difficult. There are more pages that have to be synced. It can be unclear where to find the information you are looking for. It's messy. What about

• 1 page »Distribution Specials«, instead of 11 separated pages?
• a cleanup instead of a split, if the page grows more and more?
• talk pages sometimes fit better?
  

Agreed, if pages really get long, a meaningful split makes sense. But sometimes it does not!? Thoughts? :)

TechBase: Contributing...

How you can help to make maintaining TechBase easier:

• login before you edit pages. Reviewing an edit of a logged in user is often as easy as "ah, user X, his content is ok anyway, next one..."
• do not use the "I-form". Who is 'I'? Noone knows. Especially not years later. Using 'I' in talk pages is perfectly fine. But please avoid it in articles :)
  

To all TechBase Contributors

I've just added a new page which lists the KDE TechBase contributors. The idea is to have contact data for quick questions as well as build teams for different maintenance tasks. If you are active in the techbase wiki, please add yourself to the list - be it as a reviewer reading the RSS feed, translator or article writer...

Translation of TechBase

As contributors started to translate articles in TechBase to other languages I wrote a quick howto which explains the translation system. It is pretty easy since danimo simplified it with a nifty template :)