KDE Frameworks/Getting Started

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Introduction

There are many different ways to become involved in the KDE Community, ranging all the way from a simply using our software through to being a core platform developer.

This section of KDE TechBase is designed to help get you started in participating in the technical side of the KDE community. It will explain to you how KDE Software is structured and built, and how you can participate by building KDE Software for yourself. If you just want to get started then you can skip to the build instructions, but it is recommended you first understand the background material presented here.

Using KDE Software

If you just want to use stable KDE Software for your everyday computing needs, then you do not need to build KDE Software for yourself. You should instead use the software installer provided by your Linux distribution to install KDE Software.

The best place to learn how to do this is through your distribution's normal support channels, although you may find some useful information on the following pages:

Getting Help

If you are looking for help in using the KDE Workspace or KDE Applications then please visit the KDE UserBase.

If you have any questions or problems with building or developing KDE Software please feel free to ask for help. The IRC channel #kde-devel is recommended as the best source of general help. For application specific help please try their specific mailing list or IRC channel.

Be patient while waiting for a response, and try to work through the problem yourself, we aren't going to do it all for you. Working your way through and understanding why something doesn't work is a good way to learn how to do things the right way.

Browsing The Code

All KDE Software is free and open source. You are free to view the source code, and free to make changes to the code in line with the (L)GPL family of licences.

Most KDE Software developed within the KDE Community is stored in Git repositories which are hosted at KDE Projects. There are a number of ways to browse or search the code online:

https://projects.kde.org/projects is a list of all KDE Projects, choose a project and then click on Repository to browse the source
https://quickgit.kde.org/ is an alternative online code browser for code in Git repositories
https://websvn.kde.org/ is an online code browser for code still in the Subversion repository
http://lxr.kde.org/ lets you search the code for identifiers like API calls
http://lxr.kde.org/search lets you search the code for any string
http://api.kde.org lets you browse or search the API documentation generated from the code

Read the Source Code section to learn how the KDE Software repositories are organized.

Building and Running KDE Software From Source

There are several possible ways to build and install KDE Software and the method you choose depends on what you want to do with the software. In particular if you are only wanting to build and develop a single KDE application you may not need to build the latest KDE Frameworks or KDE Plasma to do so, you may only need to build the application itself.

The easiest and recommended way to build and run KDE Software from source is using the kdesrc-build tool written by Michael Pyne. These pages will describe how to use this tool to build the KDE Software you want to work on. Other more manual methods are possible but not recommended due to the complex dependency requirements that kdesrc-build will manage for you. You can build both KDE4 and KF5 based code using kdesrc-build, but these instructions will focus on KF5.

The following sections explain the steps you need to understand and give the instructions you need to follow to successfully build KDE Software from source:

You should follow the following sections to gain a better understanding of how KDE Software is organized, how to build it, and how to run it:

Development Model

TODO: General introduction to the dev model, release cycles, etc.

Development Tools

There are a number of Development Tools that are either required or helpful when building KDE Software, such as debuggers and IDE's. For these you will usually want to use the stable packages provided by your distribution.

Contributing To KDE

Once you have a copy of KDE built you can then start contributing back to KDE. The pages below will help you find out how you can help make KDE even better.