From kde-core-devel Mon Nov 01 13:31:15 2010 From: Pau Garcia i Quiles Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 13:31:15 +0000 To: kde-core-devel Subject: Re: "Cornelius's grand plan" - Merging KDElibs into Qt Message-Id: X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=128861831414481 On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 2:18 PM, Matthias Fuchs wrote: > Am Montag 01 November 2010, 11:53:01 schrieb Sean Harmer: > [...] >> One other thing that I have found that could be prohibiting wider adoption >> of KDE as a development platform is the lack of coherent documentation. >> Please do not take this as a criticism, techbase/userbase/api docs are all >> excellent resources and are constantly improving. From experience of >> trying to get some colleagues to utilise the KDE libraries who had not >> been exposed to them before, a large hurdle was discoverability of the >> APIs. A lot of the information is there it's just a question of finding >> it. If information is difficult or time consuming to find this discourages >> developers from coming back again or from branching out and using other >> facilities in the future. I do not pretend to have the answers here. KDE >> is a huge project and for the most part developed by volunteers and godo >> documentation is very difficult and hugely expensive in terms of >> time/blood/sweat/tears to write. Kudos to all the documentation writers >> (and devs/artists/testers etc). > > I agree on that. > I often don't know if something I try to do exists already in kdelibs and then > you can see me asking on irc and fantastic people like dfaure answer me. > Despite how great that has been for me this is really not a good path for a > wider kdelibs adoption. > Maybe a good overview website could help here. There the different classes are > split into groups and you find out fast what they are for. > > Yeah writing such an overview will probably be very hard in itself, since > kdelibs is very large. > In that regard it is kinda "refreshing" -- but also demotivating since that > issue has not been solved -- to see that we are not the only ones with such > problems, e.g. imo boost faces the exact same problem. Boost is so large that > it is quite hard to grasp what all you can do with it. And even if you know > what you can do, often it is not clear if that would be a "good" -- e.g. fast > -- path to go. > There is a *huge* need of: a) a book (and a good one, not just a few tutorials like the ones in Techbase) on how to develop applications with KDE b) a huge improvement in the apidox. Take a look to http://doc.qt.nokia.com/latest , then take a look at http://api.kde.org. The difference is abysmal. My proposal: KDE eV hires 2 persons to work for 1 year on these two tasks. Book is made available on-line for free, and also on paper (I like dead tree better :-) If the experience is successful, maybe KDE could have a permanent "apidox janitor" (paid) position. Could someone in the eV please send this proposal to the proper list/board/whatever? -- Pau Garcia i Quiles http://www.elpauer.org (Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)