On this page, you'll find small coding jobs for a beginner to work on. All these problems are relatively easy, some of them might even be one-liners. Of course, it is always a good idea to find your own thing to fix, the best motivation is scratching your own itch.
These tasks are intended for beginners with little or no experience programming with KDE. For those beginners, the biggest challenges are not actually the coding problems, but setting the development environment up, finding the correct place of code where the bug happens (in the jungle of all those source files) and interacting with the community, with the final step being sending the patch.
The knowledge prerequisite for those jobs are not that big. You should be familiar in C++, and knowing Qt a bit would help. Knowing kdelibs or KMail internals is not required, that can usually be picked up during coding.
For more general information, visit the following places:
The steps for your first coding contribution are roughly like this:
Should you need help, feel free to ask us in the #kontact IRC channel.
If you find some information missing, feel free to add it to this page after you learn it.
Below follows a list of junior jobs. It always includes a rough location where in the KMail sources to start.
| This section needs improvements: Please help us to
cleanup confusing sections and fix sections which contain a todo As you can see, the section below is not yet filled out. I'll try my best to fill it out. --TMG 23:33, 19 March 2009 (UTC) |
Starting point: kmmainwidget.cpp
Difficulty: Easy
Description: The folder list on the left can have a similar quick search as the message list has, by enabling it in the configure dialog. However, it is missing the text "Search" that is shown by default in the message list quick search. It is your job to add that to the folder quick search as well.
Starting point: kmmimeparttree.cpp
Difficulty: Easy
Description: When starting KMail for the first time (i.e. empty kmailrc configuration file), the column sizes for the message structure viewer are not good. The name column is too small, although it should be the largest. KMail should provide good default column sizes for the default window size.
Starting point: kmcomposewin.cpp
Difficulty: Easy
Description: Currently, there is no easy way to see if a message will be sent as plain text or as HTML (+plain text). An indicator in the status bar would help here. Maybe the indicator should even be colored for a HTML message.
Starting point: kmmainwidget.cpp, messagelistview.cpp/core/widgetbase.cpp, configuredialog.cpp, kmmainwin.cpp/kmail_part.rc
Difficulty: Medium
Description: Currently, there are 3 little comboboxes next to the quick search dialog, that control the theme, aggregation and sort order. Experience has shown that people don't find it there. Your task is to clean this up a bit. Move the 3 little comboboxes to the menubar, as submenues of the View menu. Also, make those submenus available when right-clicking a header of the message list. Also, it would be nice to add settings to the configure dialog to change the default theme, aggregation and sort order.
Starting point: configuredialog.cpp, folderview.cpp, messagelistview/core/view.cpp
Difficulty: Medium
Description: The message list and the folder list both have tooltips that can be enabled or disabled. However, the options for this are not in the same places. The folder list tooltip can be disabled by right-clicking the header of the folder list, while the message list can only be disabled in the configure dialog. Your job is to unify this: add an option to disable the folder list tooltip to the configure dialog, and an option to disable the message list tooltip to the message list header context menu.
Starting point: messagelistview/core/themeeditor.cpp, messagelistview/core/view.cpp
Difficulty: Medium
Description: When using the classic theme, you can select additional columns by right-clicking the header. There are many icon-only columns here, like Action Item or Signature. For those icon columns, the column header text doesn't fit into the width, and this looks bad. Your job would be to add an option to the theme editor like Don't display column header text. This would simply show nothing as the column header, but still show the column names in the context menu. Also, the default themes should be adjusted to use this.
Starting point: kmmainwidget.cpp
Difficulty: Easy
Description: When the folder quick search is enabled, a restart of KMail doesn't clear the folder. It should clear it, to avoid confusion and be consistent with the message list
Starting point: folderview.cpp
Difficulty: Dead Easy (although you need an IMAP account with quota support to test the problem)
Description: The screenshot of the linked bug report says more than 1000 words. Your job is to fix that bug.
Starting point: configuredialog.cpp, identitydialog.cpp
Difficulty: Easy to Medium
Description: Identities can be tied to an outgoing SMTP account with the Special Transport setting in the advanced tab. However, that setting is lost when an SMTP account is renamed. Your job is to find out why that happens and fix the problem.
Starting point: kmfilterdlg.cpp
Difficulty: Medium
Description:
Starting point: kmreaderwin.cpp, kmreadermainwin.cpp
Difficulty: Medium
Description:
Starting point: kmmainwidget.cpp
Difficulty: Easy
Description:
Starting point: kmail.kcfg
Difficulty: Easy (but possibly boring)
Description:
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