I am collecting scripts for automating the process of getting, building, and installing a KDE desktop from cvs/svn. When I posted the question on #kde-devel, I got answers from the who’s who of KDE application development. Here are some that I have collected already.
- Aaron J. Seigo— is a core KDE developer and responsible for Kicker and the Tenor project. A god in the Linux/KDE world.
- Ali Akcaagac–Check out getkde.sh and kdemake.sh for excellent build examples. Actually, oGALAXYo (aka Ali) is a Gnome, Amiga, AND KDE developer. Who put this guy get on the list?
- Michael Pyne— Another KDE application developer. His script kdecvs-build is fairly well known among Linux desktop application developers.
- Waldo Bastian— May be responsible for more of KDE (as it is today) than any other developer. Currently also working on Freedesktop.org, but try not to hold that against him.
- Thiago Macieira— Another super powerful, blah blah blah, KDE god, blah blah blah… Does, well, everything in KDE.
That is something that never ceases to amaze me about free software. Some of these people are considered super-stars in the world of hackerdom, but they will stop to answer questions and pass along code (or for that matter just talk) with anyone who is interested. Its like the first time I had a Perl question and could not find an answer on the web, so I sent a message to a Perl mailing list. Larry Wall answered by question… the inventor of Perl.
This doesn’t happen in the rest of the normal world. When you need some help with your taxes, you don’t simply call up Allen Greenspan. Nobody messing around with their own comic book, sends letters to Stan Lee for advice. Even in the computer world this is unusual; do you really think Steve Jobs is gonna help you out with your Apple? Or that Bill Gates will tell you how to debug Windows XP? It just make working with free software that much more, fun.