KDE Frameworks/Getting Started

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Introduction

There are many different ways to become involved in the KDE Community, starting with simply using our software. This guide is to help you get started on the technical side of developing the software itself.

Note

If you just want to use stable KDE Software for your everyday computing needs, then you do not usually need to build KDE Software for yourself. See Getting KDE Software for information about how to get hold of the software for your system.

It is important to note that the version of KDE Software that is provided by your distribution or downloaded via an installer is not the same as the version that is being worked on by software developers. If you are using KDE CoolApp 1.2, the developers are working on the "development" version, usually called "KDE CoolApp master". This is the version that will become KDE CoolApp 1.3, or maybe 2.0. If you want to get involved in developing KDE Software, you will need to get hold of and build the development versions.

This guide will aim to show you how to build, run and help improve the development versions of KDE Software. We will primarily be looking at submitting a patch to change the software, but the information here is also useful if you want to test whether a bug still exists in the software, for example.

If you just want to get started building the code then you can skip to the build instructions, but it is recommended you first understand the background material presented here.

Getting Help

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

Before you continue with this guide, it is a good idea to get on IRC. This is a realtime text communication system, and the primary "casual" communication tool for KDE developers.

You will need a way to connect to the freenode IRC network. We suggest Konversation (see the handbook for help in setting it up), although a convenient alternative if you want to get going quickly is freenode's online webchat. You will need to choose a nick (the name you appear on the network as), connect to freenode and join #kde-devel.

The other main channel for communication is the KDE mailing lists. To start with, you should subscribe to the kde-devel list (you will need to subscribe before you can send emails to the list).

For more information about getting help, see the main Getting Help page, and remember that applications often have their own IRC channels and mailing lists that can be better places to ask for help.

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.

Development Policies

KDE Software is a very large, diverse and complex code base and the KDE Community has developed many policies and processes to make the KDE Software development process manageable, which are documented elsewhere in TechBase. As you become more involved in KDE Development, you will need to become familiar with them, as well as any policies specific to the projects you are contributing to, but for your first few patches you will not need to worry about most of them.

At this point, the main thing you need to read is the KDE Community Code of Conduct, because this is the basis for interacting with the KDE Community in general. You will also need to be willing for your code to be licensed under the one of the licenses listed in the licensing policy.

If you want to make changes to library code, especially the KDE Frameworks, reading the library code policy, the library documentation policy and the binary compatibility issues with C++ page can help you write code that will satisfy the requirements of those projects.

Build And Run

The following sections explain the steps you need to successfully build and run KDE Software from source:

Contributing

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