Documentation

Become part of the KEG

If you like your program to be part of the KDE Extragear, you need to make sure that:

• It is a KDE application.
• You consider it stable or near stable and plan to release it soon.
• You (or someone else) will actively maintain it.

Please also note that

• Unmaintained apps will be removed eventually.
• If you want regular releases, you need release your program yourself
• There will be an extragear package per module on each kde release, including only applications that have stable tag and compiles against KDE release. The extragear maintainer will do this part.

Now you are ready to do:

• Contact the KDE Extragear maintainer (currently Helio Chissini de Castro) and chat with him about your app and the Extragear.
• Contact sysadmin office.kde.org and ask for SVN access and write access to the extragear webpages (that is www/areas/extragear). Info about getting account: Developer Account FAQ
• Subscribe yourself to the mailing list.
• Add your application to the website (see below).

This is the mandatory part:

• BEFORE FIRST IMPORT: Verify that your code is usable and compiles against the latest stable KDE release, otherwise the addition will be rejected.
• Authors are expected to keep their release info up to date and to define freeze periods and release dates.
• For your application to be included in the next extragear realease, you must provide a TAG called stable ( lower case ) on tags/stable/extragear/<KEG-MODULE>/<yourapp>, which will be pointing to the latest stable code on repository. If you prefer have a stable BRANCH, please remember to always update tags pointing to this branch.
• Translators will be able to work on your program strings after the execution of the daily script skripty, but only if you provide the adequate 'messages' target in your Makefile.am (see another KEG application for an example). Translations will then be available in i10n/<LANG>/<KEG-MODULE>.
• If you wrote one, put the handbook of your application in trunk/extragear/<KEG-MODULE>/doc/<yourapp>/
• To allow the translation of the handbook, you can put manualy the handbook strings in trunk/l10n/templates/docmessages/<KEG-MODULE>/. To extract the strings, use the tool xml2pot from the kdesdk module (probably already installed on your system).

Add your app to the website

Now, this one is really easy. Ask access for the www/areas/extragear, create a <yourapp>.xml file and a <yourapp> subdirectory in the directory apps (it is easiest to copy one of the existing files and modify it accordingly) and then add your application to the file inc/appinfo.inc :

• <yourapp>.xml should provide the current version, small description, etc. using this format:

  <?xml version='1.0' ?>
  <kegapp>
          <app>
                  <title>YourApp</title>
                  <type>KegModule</type>
  
                  <stable>x.y.z</stable>
                  <smalldescription>
                    YourApp is an app doing what you can expect from such an app.
                  </smalldescription>
          </app>
  </kegapp>
  

  This file should be placed in trunk/www/areas/extragear/apps or submitted to the extragear maintainer for addition.
• the <yourapp> directory will contain a long description, or even a full web site about your application. It should also be placed in trunk/www/areas/extragear/apps. See another extragear application for an example.

Do Release Preparations

What to do when you plan to do a release.

• Update the website (update information in inc/appinfo.inc, your apps/YOURAPP.xml and subdir or mail Helio)
• Notify the Translation team at kde-i18n-doc(at)mail.kde.org about i10n freeze.

Creating a package of your application

It is possible to create a package of your application including translations. In trunk/kdesdk/scripts/createtarball you will find a small application for exactly this purpose.

Edit the config.ini file to include your application, and run create_tarball.rb. (try using -h to see its options).

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