Tips to get involved in KDE as prepration for Google Summer of Code 2024

Saturday, 2 March 2024 | Gruenich

KDE got accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2024! Are you thinking about getting involved into KDE development? Check out the cool ideas KDE devs came up, they showcase what can be achieved by taking part as a student in GSoC. How to start? How to get involved? How to make an impression that will help your application?

Google Summer of Code

Prerequisites

  • You like KDE, you like us as a community, you can follow our philosophy, you like our product (a desktop or at least an specific application), and you resonate with our tech stack (C++, Qt, CMake).
  • Grab some code from our GitLab, clone a repository and build it locally. This sounds easy. For first-timers it is not easy. Reach out for help in case you struggle.
  • Run your self-built software. Now you can explore the joy of developing KDE.

You do not need an idea, at least not yet. Give it some time.

Get involved

Try getting involved. Usually it is not easy to fix bugs of implement a feature request from KDE bugtracking system. Some are hard to fix. Others need debates of future directions or best ways to get things done.

I propose you start looking for other opportunities:

  1. Fix compiler warnings. Compilers analyze the code and as a result they might warn you. This can have various reasons like bad coding practice, code that is difficult to read and might easily be misread by humans, code with bad performance, bug-prone constructs.
  2. Fix deprecation warnings. KDE, Qt, and every software evolves. Old interfaces are replaced by newer ones. The old ones are not directly thrown away, but deprecated. The deprecation warning reminds the developer to migrate from the old to the new interface. Some deprecations are trivial to fix, others require ample code changes.
  3. Fix findings of static analyzers and linters. These are tools that analyze code more thorough compared to a compiler for the price of a longer runtime. They offer great hints for but are prone to false-positives (wrong warnings). Good tools for KDE are Cppcheck, Clazy and qmllint.
  4. Fix crash bugs. Crashes often occur when the code contains memory issues. Examples are using objects that were deleted, accessing arrays out of bounds, de-referencing null pointers. Tools like a good debugger, Valgrind, and AddressSanitizer (and its cousins MemorySanitizer and UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer) help to localize the problem. Crashes are more difficult to understand and fix compared to warnings for tools.

Try to work for fixes of one to ten cases. More makes reviewing harder. Create a pull request and wait for feedback.

Rationale

Why do I think these areas are good to start working? The maintainer might reject your pull request. This can always happen. Compared to implementing a whole new feature, the amount of work you invested is limited.

Once you have an idea for GSoC and write your application, you can point to your pull requests as proof of work. Maintainers see your involvement, they see how you interact, and you get an early sense whether you like the contributing experience or not.

Even in the case that you do not want to become an GSoC student, you improved KDE a tiny little bit. Great feeling, isn't it?

Word of warning

Not everybody deem warnings worth to be fixed -- in general or in specific cases. You will learn what kind of warnings getting fixed are welcome. I already wrote a blog post about my experiences with fixing some Cppcheck in Kile.