Building KDE and OpenHatch’s buildhelper



Photo Credit: “Riding With Despair Prohibited” by Gene Han

I remember the time when I knew how to write code / fix bugs, but had no clue about build systems, version control or anything like that. And of course I didn’t know how to write clean code. I was trying to make a KStars-like program in MS DOS, “stealing” KStars’ data, but I didn’t know how to do something, so I looked up KStars’ code. It was so much neater than my horrible code. Finally, I gave up on my DOS program and I wrote a mail to Jason Harris, the author of KStars, to say I wanted to help. He pointed me to the docs on building KDE4 on techbase.

I got stuck a couple of times while building some of the dependencies. I sent a couple of emails to Jason Harris, showing the output from the failed build, but of course, Jason couldn’t keep helping me all the time. The lack of a working build, in fact, caused me to give up for a while. It took attending a KDE Project Day at FOSS.IN 2007 to bring me back.

Today, I saw a mockup of a “buildhelper” tool that the OpenHatch project is working on making. (If you haven’t heard of OpenHatch, here’s a sentence from the about page: “We believe that our community loses tons of prospective members because learning how and where you can fit in is difficult.”)

Karen of OpenHatch drew the mockup, and wrote about the buildhelper at the OpenHatch blog. The part about IRC caught my attention.

Each step has the basic name/description of a step, a more detailed explanation (if necessary), a link (if necessary, e.g. to the relevant git repository), an estimate of how long the step should take, a help button that links to either a relevant OpenHatch mission or other background-info tutorial that a project favors (optional), and a “crap, it didn’t work and I don’t understand why” button that takes the user to the project’s IRC channel (the dev channel specifically, if the project has more than one), where they can solicit help from more experienced project volunteers and point to the specific step where things went wrong.

I think in my context, the IRC link would’ve saved me.

The good thing about KDE is that there is a lot of build documentation already. But it would be awesome to make it interactive, and made clear, step-by-step.

OpenHatch is an open source project, so it’ll be ready when it’s ready. But Asheesh said on IRC that they’re expecting to release this feature by end April, and they’re going to have templates which various projects can fill, to make the tool specific to their buildsystem.

It would be awesome if KDE participated. I can see that it would benefit the several potential contributors who know some C / C++ from high school etc, but have never worked with a large project that requires a build system.