Working with KDE Sources?

The easy way: If you want no hassle, you can contribute without even building KDE sources. You will still be able to fill and manage some bugs, write articles, HOWTOs and improve documentation (for the current release, and only available at the KDE documentation website), help users and participate in discussions and write content for the kde.org websites, using the latest KDE release provided by your distribution or vendor with little disadvantages.

If you are trying to improve a module or program that doen't depend on the latest changes made to KDE, use the stable distrubution of KDE and the unstable branch of the program you are working on. For instance, koffice usually works with the latest stable branch. In this cases, as the stable branch is usually provided by your distribution, you need to build only the module you want to work with, instead of the whole KDE, using the basic KDE libraries provided by your distribution as the base. We call this "the single module strategy". Only bugfixes are allowed in the stable releases, so you wont have to worry larger changes affecting your code.

Instructions to build KDE stable on your own are at http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/Stable_Version

Unstable

If you are contributing to user interface or documents, building the unstable branch is recommended, as the new features and text can only be added to the unstable branch. You will be able to fill bugs and wishes reports as they appear, and manage bugs by being able to see if they are still present in the absolute latest version of your application. You will be able to write previews of your applications, showing the wonderful new features that will soon be available to the general public, all that on top of what you already could do with the stable versions.

Building the unstable branch means setting up the building environment, facing changing dependencies problems, and sometimes, modules that won't build because there are temporary errors in the code. The unstable branch is where new features are tested out, your application will be invariably affected by this. The unstable branch also follows a the KDE release schedule, which dictates when larger changes are allowed to be made.

There is no KDE3 unstable branch. KDE3 is mostly feature-frozen.

Subversion trunk

Currently KDE4 lives in the trunk of KDE's Subversion repository. Subversion (SVN) is necessary to assimilate the efforts the thousands of KDE contributors. By providing up-to-the-minute access to code, Subversion access helps reduce problems when multiple people work on the same task.

Resources

• Anonymous SVN Quickstart guide: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Sources/Anonymous_SVN.
• Getting Started Build KDE4: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/KDE4.
• Exhaustive documentation about Subversion: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/.

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