When walking in a big group of people you have to check every now and then for the slower ones so you don’t leave them behind and lose them. It’s the same in a community like KDE. Every now and then you have to check if everyone can still keep up and if not take the necessary steps. That’s why for the second time now I’ve asked KDE developers to tell me which parts of KDE they think really needs some new blood or more helping hands. This is the list of answers I got:
- KDE bindings needs a maintainer for PHPQt and some helping hands for Qyoto/Kimono (the C# bindings). – contact kde-bindings@kde.org
- KDEPIM looking for someone to work on Akgregator and the Kontact shell. – contact the kde-pim mailing list
- Juk could benefit from a port to actual KDE Platform 4 technologies (away from KDE3 Support and possibly port Bangarang’s Nepomuk storage to Juk). – contact the kde-multimedia list
- KOffice is in need of people poking Karbon and Kivio. – contact the koffice mailing list
- KCalc, KFloppy, Kdf, KTimer and Sweeper from kdeutils do not have maintainers at the moment. Most of these applications are almost unused, but they haven’t been excluded from the module and might at least provide some fun to newcomers. – contact kde-utils-devel@kde.org
- Okular could use some help fixing crashes and finishing features. – contact aacid@kde.org
- UserBase is looking for people to help improve documentation. Tasks and guidelines are available on http://userbase.kde.org/Tasks_and_Tools. – contact annew@kde.org
Quite the mix – surely there’s something exciting in there for everyone. So if you are someone who wants to contribute to KDE and looking for a place to start or an experienced contributor looking for a new project, this is where your help would be really appreciated. Choose your direction and get your hands dirty 😉
I thought Kopete also was in need of some love at the moment? They’ve got more developers lately?
Anyway, good that you get some focus on “abandoned” projects as well! I guess for most people it is more exiting to implement new amazing features, but for usability and the overall impression, ironing out these issues are at least as important.
Yes you are right. Kopete can probably be added to that list as well. Strangely enough it did however not come up when I asked.
I think that SKIM does also need some love.
SKIM is maybe not so well-known, but is very important.
SKIM are some small program’s for non-alphabet input.
This is very important for Linux users in countries like China, Japan, Korea, India and so on.
@Ronald
There’s no need for Skim. You can use ibus and ibus-qt, and it works better (scim-qtimm is unmaintained IIRC).
The Juk webpages urgently need updates too
This pages is fine (but doesn’t contain much info):
http://kde.org/applications/multimedia/juk/
It does however link to the homepage and JuK on KDE-Apps.org, which are about Juk 2 instead of 3.
Making Juk use Nepomuk might be a good idea. According to the Nepomuk techbase page it’s in need of some lovin too:
“Nepomuk is a rather young project with a notorious shortage in developers”