KDE Developer's HOWTO

David Sweet

Caleb Tennis

Revision 2.1 (July 1, 2003)

Distributed under the Open Content License v1.0 as of version September 13, 2000

To help develop KDE or a KDE application you need to know how to: (i) find KDE information and code, (ii) use CVS, and (iii) compile. This document aims to help you do these things without losing too much hair.

This HOWTO is geared toward new developers, occasional developers, and anyone considering contributing to the most excellent free software project that is KDE. It addresses questions that I and others have been asking on the kde-devel mailing list recently along with some more general information.

You can find a current version of this document at the KDE Developer's HOWTO web page. To contribute, comment, or correct, please email me at


Table of Contents

1. Information and Source Code
General Information
URLs
Mailing lists
2. KDE Repository
Introduction
Keeping track of changes
3. Compiling and Safe Development Practices (with configure)
Organizing
Compiling Qt 3.1
Compiling KDE (HEAD)
Compiling tips
4. Documentation
KDOC: The KDE Class Documentation Tool for C++
5. Packaging and Submitting Code to KDE
Packaging
GNU Configure
Shared Libraries!
Example Makfile.am for a Shared Library
LSM file
Submitting
6. Acknowledgements
7. About this document
Finding
Other formats
Changes
Changes from version <July 06, 2003> to <May 21, 2006>:
Changes from version <January 27, 2003> to <July 06, 2003>:
Changes from version <January 03, 2003> to <January 27, 2003>:
Changes from version <September 13, 2000> to <January 3, 2003>:
Changes from version <March 11, 2000> to <September 13, 2000>:
Changes from version <July 1, 1999> to version <March, 11, 2000>: