First of all, I would like to say thanks to everyone who provided help and support since I took over Dolphin’s maintainership. Two patches have been contributed already (1, 2 – the first one will be in 4.9.0, but the second one not due to string freeze issues), and some people helped to handle the incoming bug reports. I would like to mention Christoph Feck and Jekyll Wu here because they have triaged lots of bugs over a long period – thank you very much for that!

I am also quite happy about those who have expressed interest in getting involved with Dolphin development and have asked for some guidance about how to get started. As I said in my last post, I’m a bit busy at the moment, and from now on I will be away for a couple of weeks and cannot do any Dolphin-related work at all (I might be able to check mails from time to time though), but I would like to provide a few ideas about possible first steps at least.

How to keep in contact with other people working on Dolphin and how to find something to work on

Bugs are reported at bugs.kde.org. Here are some example queries: bugs (not wishes) reported in the last two months, all open Dolphin bugs.

The mailing list where Dolphin development is discussed is kfm-devel. Feel free to ask there if you have any questions concerning the code. Please do not use this list to report bugs.

Patches are submitted for review at Review Board. Use the ‘dolphin’ product, this makes sure that a notification email is sent to the kfm-devel list. You will need a KDE identity account to use Review Board and many more KDE-related services. If you want to work on something larger or if you are unsure if the approach you have in mind to fix a problem is the right one, please ask on the mailing list before you invest a lot of time.

We have a forum which can be used for support requests and Dolphin-related questions. If it turns out that something which is discussed at the forum is a bug, please make sure that it is reported at bugs.kde.org.

Building Dolphin from source

This is the first and maybe most important step that anyone willing to help out with development has to take. There is some information about building the entire KDE source at TechBase, including links to tools like kdesrc-build and build-tool which can be used to perform most of the steps automatically.

But it is also possible to build just kde-baseapps, which is the repository where Dolphin is located, provided the kdelibs development package provided by your distribution are installed. Finding the easiest way to do it and publishing it has been on my TODO list fore quite some time, but because I never got round to do it, I’ll just provide ideas how it can be done. Maybe you will find even better ways. If you find a way to build just Dolphin and think it is easy enough for others as well, please post a description as a comment or provide a link to a script, pastebin, etc. We can put the easiest way to build Dolphin on a wiki then.

There are some instructions for building Kate which could be adapted to Dolphin.

Frederik Gladhorn recently posted some instructions for building just one KDE application.

Michael Pyne commented on Frederik’s post and said that you could also use his kdesrc-build script to build just one application.