KDE Project History/KDE One (Developer Meeting)

KDE One in Arnsberg, Germany

From August, 28th to September, 1st, 1997, some KDE developers met in Arnsberg, Germany, to discuss design issues, the future of the project, and - of course - to code a lot. Some areas in which a lot of progress has been made are KFM stability, internationalization and mime-type detection. In addition, work in progress has been presented and discussed.

Sponsors

KDE One has only been made possible by the generous donations of our sponsors who paid for flight tickets, accomodation, Internet access and Coke. I think it's only fair to mention them here:

Sponsors that helped with money donations

• S.u.S.E. GmbH
• Caldera Inc.
• LST Software GmbH
• O'Reilly Verlag
• JF Lehmanns Buchhandlung
• Delix Computer GmbH
• Dorint Hotel Arnsberg-Neheim
• Wirtschaftsförderung Arnsberg GmbH

Sponsors that helped with Internet access, machines and logistic and organizational support

• Delta Internet GmbH
• LiVe Linux-Verband

Discussion results

Here are some results from our discussions. I will add more later as more documents become available. If you think I have forgotten something (I most surely have), please mail me.

• We are not sure if we want or need distributed objects, but if we do, Corba (in its incarnation Korba) is the way to go.
• We already have a great mechanism for embedding applications into each other: KParts. (More on this later).
• We need a list of keybindings that are obligatory for all KDE-applications. Such a list has been proposed and will be published later on this web site.
• The old filesystem structure has proven to be unsatisfactory. A new one has been proposed and will be published later on this web site.
• All KDE applications should be internationalized. In order to internationalize your application, you only have to include klocale.h and kapp.h in every source file that needs strings and replace all occurrences of fixed strings with klocale->translate( "string" ). Stephan Kulow, Kalle Dalheimer and our translators will then do the rest. If you want to help with the translations, please contact Stephan Kulow.
• We need more and better documentation. A user's and a programmer's guide are already on the way. As soon as Taj has finished kdoc, the HTML documentation of the library will be included in every KDE distribution.
• In order to make the applications not in the base distributions better known, we will include the components page in the help tree of every KDE distribution

Thanks

Kudos go to our sponsors, to the town of Arnsberg who has made things easy for us, and especially to Achim Cloer and his crew from Delta Internet who have done an amazing job in creating a productive work atmosphere for us (they went so far as to set up new X terminals at 2 am when we needed more of them!), to Arnt and Eirik from Troll Tech for participating and inviting us for dinner and of course to all KDE developers who have made this meeting a success.