On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 09:45:05AM -0500, Bob Tilley (AT&T) wrote: > I have KDevelop 3 installed and wish to learn KDE programming. > > I am sure that the source of most programs in the Debian archives > consist of complicated projects with many source files and > dependencies. Is it possible to download complete projects for KDE > programs? > > Individually constructing KDE projects with their numerous > dependencies and installing all source files piecemeal does not > appeal to me. For example, how could I download the project for > KMail, open it within KDevelop 3, change certain files, and > recompile the project to produce a new binary. Does such a beast > exist that will allow me to download everything at once?
I don't know if KMail was developed with KDevelop,* but be aware that its use is not mandatory for KDE apps. So picking a random app may not provide you with one setup to use KDevelop. Also note that in Debian many packages foo have foo-dev versions that you will need to install if you want to to development based on them. This is particularly true for libraries. See the suggests files for the kdevelop package for some KDEish development libraries you'll almost certainly need to develop KDE apps (even if you don't use KDevelop). There was an additional wrinkle with Qt (Qt is a library of widgets and misc things; KDE is built atop it) on Debian. The Qt development headers were split into separate Debian packages for the current and obsolete/deprecated parts, and this caused some confusion. I think that split is now history, but perhaps someone who knows can confirm. At any rate, you may need to use the obsolete stuff to compile existing apps, though obviously you should try not to use it for new ones. Somewhat confusingly, KDE3 uses kdelibs4, but Qt3. * Historically, KMail couldn't have been developed with KDevelop 3, since the latter is pretty new.