KDE is a free software project that lives from voluntary contributions. Everybody is encouraged to contribute to KDE. Not only programmers are welcome. There are many ways in which you can help to improve KDE:

There are several places to look for more information if you want to get involved in the development. The first step is to subscribe to some of the mailing lists. You will soon see something that can be improved or added.

There is a bug tracking system available at http://bugs.kde.org. The system features a wizard to submit new bug reports and a list of all known bugs.

The easiest way to submit a bug is to select Help->Report Bug... from the menu bar of the application with the bug. This will open a small dialog box with a link to the bug tracking system. Please make sure to follow the instructions of the bug reporting wizard.

Everybody is encouraged to develop software for KDE. What you should do first depends strongly on your experience, e.g. whether you have already learned C++ or have experience with the Qt™ toolkit and so on.

To get into KDE programming, you will need some basic tools: cmake, and gcc. You should look to http://techbase.kde.org/ for more tips.

Another excellent resource for learning KDE programming is the Qt™ online tutorials. These are installed along with Qt™. To view them, open $QTDIR/doc/html/index.html in Konqueror and bookmark it. The tutorials can be found under "Using Qt". The source code for each lesson can be found in the $QTDIR/tutorial directory.

There is, however, one thing that everybody interested in programming for KDE should do: subscribe to the developers mailing list. To subscribe, you have to send an email to [email protected] with the subject subscribe your_email_address.

The KDE project uses SVN to develop the core parts of the software. Usually, when you have changed one of the parts (e.g. fixed a bug), and you want to commit this change, the best way is to create a patch against a current snapshot and send this patch to the developer/maintainer of the respective program.

If you are doing this more or less regularly, there are instructions here on how to get write access to the SVN repository: http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Get_a_SVN_Account. But be aware that more users will slow down SVN access for all developers, so we want to keep the number of people with direct SVN access reasonably small. But feel free to ask!

Yes. Instructions on how to get anonymous, read-only SVN access are here: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Sources/Anonymous_SVN

No, there are currently no anonymous SVN mirror sites for KDE. If you're interested in setting one up, please contact (sysadmin AT kde.org)

Look at the The KDE Translators' and Documenters' Web Site to see whether your program is already translated (most are). Otherwise you will find information there on how to do it yourself.