Contributing to KDE

Contributing to KDE

Over the course of HackIllinois, I set up a development environment for KDE and dipped my toes into contributing a 20 year old collective of free and open source software. I tested applications and wrote a patch for Konsole , a terminal emulator, that got approved and merged, and helped to triage and review bug reports, and updated various documentation

Contributions

Implemented new functionality for Konsole

• Wrote a patch for switching to arbitrary Konsole tabs using keyboard shortcuts and added default keybindings for the first 9 tabs
• Approved and merged into master by hour 6 of HackIllinois!

Triaged and reviewed various bugs

• Confirmed replicability of issues and requested additional information as necessary
• Identified and tagged duplicate bug reports
• Processed 11 different bug reports throughout the weekend

Reviewed and provided feedback for patches in Phabricator

• Tested 3 patches waiting for review and provided feedback to authors
• One of them, a new breeze icon for Yakuake, was able to be merged into master this weekend

Researched a large Yakuake bug

• Researched and debugged a relatively widespread bug in Yakuake, a drop-down terminal emulator, with multiple reports across the past 4 years that caused the application to spawn incorrectly for high dpi screens with scaling factors > 1
• Consolidated duplicate and related bug reports into a single report with clear information and reached out to bug reporters for more information
• Gathered and provided information about existing workarounds to bug reporters as temporary relief
• Wrote up informal report summarizing replicable process, problem code, and findings
• Identified core cause of bug and potential remediation possibilities moving forwards
• Began initial development towards a patch

Started development of a Yakuake patch

• Open new tab/split with the same directory as previous session
• In progress

Final Thoughts

KDE has been something I've personally been invested in for years, having used the KDE Neon operating system on my personal laptop for over two years, and some of their other applications for longer.

Thanks to the wonderful project mentor for KDE here this weekend, Nate Graham, I was finally able to get my feet wet in contributing to a large scale open source project and make meaningful changes in just this short weekend! Not only was I able to write a functional patch for an issue and have it merged, I was also able to help kickstart some stagnating bugs and patches back into the review process.

Overall, I had a blast this weekend, and can't wait to keep contributing to this fantastic community! I think I really gained a lot of new knowledge here, surprisingly much of it being in the review and overview process as opposed to just stronger programming skills or learning new libraries and frameworks. It was truly a unique and fantastic time.

Built With

• cmake
• cpp
• qt