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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: de-mythifing KDevelop and KOffice
From:       Nicolas Goutte <nicolasg () snafu ! de>
Date:       2004-04-22 8:48:11
Message-ID: 200404221048.11044.nicolasg () snafu ! de
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On Tuesday 20 April 2004 22:24, Pupeno wrote:
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> First of all, sorry for the cross-posting but I think this issue really
> matters to all this mailing lists, if I was wrong, I apologise.
> I see that in various places KDevelop and KOffice are named as the two
> biggest projects that achieved a lot by a very small team of developers,
> that also carries the request for help of other developers to make this
> aclaimed applications (or set of applications) better.
> I consider myself a developer and to be honest I'd be afraid of putting my
> hands in either KDevelop nor KOffice. Why ? Because from the outside both
> seems to be extremely complex things, that can be broken easily.
> KDevelop... a program for programmers... you need to make high quality
> code, there are tons of plug ins (and that means a complex plug in
> structure) and the complex and huge amount of templates. KOffice, everyone
> bets is hard to understand the native document format (which should be very
> complex/complete to be able to save that huge amount of information),
> displaying things on the screen layed out is not something easy (or doesn't
> seem) and managing filters seems a work for a wizard.
> Now, is all this complexity I'm mentioning true ? or there are parts of
> KDevelop and KOffice that are simple and that a newbie developer could help
> ? If the answer to the lattest question is 'yes', there are huge myths

There *are* tasks for newbies in KOffice.

In the meantime, we have even task lists for KOffice, see:
http://www.koffice.org/developer/tasks

(If you do not like the tasks shown, we surely can find one for you... yes, 
you!)

We would need also people ready to write documentations, be it the application 
documentation, other more secondary documents, or be it documents for 
koffice.org.

As for file format, we are switching to OASIS. While the OASIS file format 
specification is not an easy one, it is better documented that the current 
KOffice file formats. (See http://xml.openoffice.org for the OO file formats 
and the links to OASIS.)

As for filter work, it is not an "arcane" thing. It becomes "arcane" when the 
documentation of a file format is not at the level of what is needed. But we 
have a few filters between openly documented file formats, and for those 
filters we would need people too.

The only real constraint for developing on KOffice is to have to work on 
KOffice CVS HEAD. (That seems unfortunately already to be a too high step for 
some.)

> (like the ones I mentioned and more, that I believe and more other devs
> believe) that will keep new developers from putting their hands on both
> projects. That's why I'm doing this public invitation to KDevelop and
> KOffice developers to write some articles to the dot or whatever
> de-mythifing the developer of such big applications and inviting other
> people to work with you. Maybe some interviews could help. Maybe the myths
> are true and there's nothing that can be done. This is just, my humble
> opinion.
> Thank you.

Have a nice day!

> - --
> Pupeno: pupeno@pupeno.com
> http://www.pupeno.com
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