Hi!

I'm sorry if this is the wrong place to post this question but it looked to be the only suitable place for it.

I love the KDE project and I try to help out using the KDE Bug Tracking System. I'm hopefully going to start looking into re-learning software development again as I haven't done it in quite a long time, but for now I'm just doing really simple things so that I can get a look at how everything works... which is where my first question comes in.

At the moment I'm trying to fix really trivial and simple things, like typo and grammar errors. I learned from a friend that I have to use a revision control system in order to get the latest version of the source code. How would I go about downloading this?

My second question is regarding the actual patching. Once I have edited the code, what do I do then? If I'm not mistaken, I believe I have to create a special kind of patch file that shows the difference(s) between the latest version of the code available on the revision control system and my changes so that I can upload it as a proposed patch to the KDE Bug Tracking System. Is this patch created in the KDevelop IDE that I use?

Thanks for any help!

KDE uses the Subversion, revision control system. You can checkout the relevant folders like so:

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svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/

For example Plasma ( located at trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma )

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svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/plasma

I do not know if KDevelop3 supports creating SVN patches, I use a standard text editor ( vi, kwrite or kate ) normally.

You can use the command 'svn diff' to view your changes, and this piped command to create your patch file

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svn diff > /path/to/patch/file

It would be recommended to send typo patches to the application appropriate mailing list unless it fixes a bug.
A good site to find typo's, etc. is the EBN ( English Breakfast Network ) located here Which has categories for each module, and different types of errors.

If you plan on doing this over a long period of time, it would be recommended to get and SVN account ( instructions here )

I recommend you to check out Techbase, hopefully you'll find many answers there.

Examples:
Getting Started
Send Patches
Get a SVN Account

Good luck!

Thank you both very much for your helpful replies!