Importing your project in KDE CVS

Your program interests people, you feel you have time to really work on it, you need more feedback and help for improving it. You also agree to release it under the GPL license or equivalent. You can ask for a cvs account to import it in kdenonbeta. The kdenonbeta module is quite big and is not distributed with the official KDE. It is not packaged nor translated and feature freeze does not apply to kdenonbeta. Its purpose is to allow other developers to work on your application and to test it. Of course, you will need qt-copy, arts and kdelibs from cvs HEAD at least. Please see a tutorial here on how to get started for compiling KDE from cvs HEAD.

In order to get a cvs account, please follow theses instructions. Send a mail to sysadmin (at) office (dot) kde (dot) org to justify why you need cvs access. Tell that you want to import your application (app_name) in the kdenonbeta module. Make sure to specify your full name and e-mail address, if the From field in your mails doesn't specify them. You can also choose a nickname for your user login. You can currently choose between the standard non-encrypted CVS protocol (pserver) and the encrypted CVS-over-ssh. If you choose pserver, send also an encrypted password (for instance using useradd dummy ; passwd dummy ; grep dummy /etc/passwd /etc/shadow). If you choose CVS-over-ssh, send a public ssh key (e.g. ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub).

Wait for the answer from a KDE sysadmin.

Once you have compiled at least qt-copy, arts and kdelibs, you need to check out kdenonbeta files. Log in the cvs server with your login user and password.

    $ cvs co -l kdenonbeta
    $ cd kdenonbeta
    $ cvs co admin  (or ln -s ../kde-common/admin .admin)

You copy your project main dir with everything in kdenonbeta and then, in your project main dir, you issue a:

    $ make disclean

All the .o files must be gone. You can also remove by hand all Makefile, Makefile.in (not Makefile.am) and all kdevelop related files. Remove the admin, autom4te.cache, debug, doc, po and templates folders. You must just keep some files and the src subdir. Then, you cd .. to go back in kdenonbeta and you type:

    $ make -f Makefile.cvs
    $ ./configure --prefix=$KDEDIR
    $ cd your_project_name
    $ make
    $ su -c 'make install'

All these steps must go well. If there are errors, you should be able to correct them by carefully reading the error message. If you are really stuck, please go to IRC and ask on #kde or #kde-devel, someone will help you.

then, in kdenonbeta dir:

    $ cvs add your_project_name
    $ cvs add your_project_name/*
    $ cvs add your_project_name/src
    $ cvs add your_project_name/src/*
    $ cvs commit

You get the window (vi editor as default) where you can log your message. It's a good practice to note what your commit is about. In your case, you will say (type i first if you are in vi to get in edit mode):

First import of your_app_name which does this and that.

Check if all the files are added correctly. If not, cvs add filename and cvs commit.

Each time you want to work on your project, don't forget to log in the kde server with your user login and password and do a:

    $ cvs up

to be sure you have the latest version.