Opening up Nepomuk Development

The Nepomuk development process has been fairly closed to outsiders. This was never a conscious decision made by the Nepomuk Team, we just never took the effort to open up the development, and make it more appealing to new comers.

For most of the last 2 years, the development model has been Sebastian and I working on our own personal list of things, and occasionally sending private emails to each other or communicating via IRC.

I’m trying to change all of this. The aim is to make Nepomuk development more open and friendlier to new developers. Getting developer feedback at the Nepomuk BOF at Akademy was the first step.

Compiling Nepomuk

One of the largest hurdles in contributing to Nepomuk was that the code resided in kdelibs. Fortunately, with 4.9, we have our own repository - nepomuk-core, where most of the Nepomuk related code has moved.

For most of Nepomuk development, you just need to compile nepomuk-core. However for some stuff like the kioslaves, controller, and kcm, you’ll still need kde-runtime.

Nepomuk Tasks

Over the last week, I’ve created a separate mailing list for Nepomuk Bug Coordination, and I’ve been adding simple tasks to bugzilla (mostly from my personal TODO list).

The idea is to make the Nepomuk development process more public. Anyone can see the current list of tasks that we are working on, and which developer is working on which task (Assigned field)

Right now there are just about 20 tasks at Bugzilla. I’m in the process of splitting down the big tasks, like Fix Nepomuk Backup, into smaller chunks which individual developers can handle.

I’ve listed some simple tasks which do not require any knowledge of RDF, SPARQL or the ontologies.

Beginner Junior Jobs

• Port QueryService to ResultIterator
• Port nepomuksearch kioslave to Result Iterator
• Add Nepomuk/Vocabulary header

User Interface

• Nepomuk Controller Alignment
• Only show Indexing Options if the FileIndexer is enabled
• Split “Folders to Index” and “Include Exclude Filters”
• Discard “Query Base Folder listing” from the KCM
• Add a button to check for new files

Scripting

• Proper Nepomuk2 namespace

Git skills

• nepomuk-widgets repository

API Design

• API for controlling list of indexed files

Medium Level tasks

• Disable SHA1 Analyzer
• Index new files when on Battery
• Port to QDbusConnection::Call
• Merge kded module into the QueryService

But where are you guys?

If you’re interested come talk to us -

• IRC: #nepomuk-kde
• Mailing List: nepomuk@kde.org

Get involved!!

Also, if you have any suggestions on how we can make Nepomuk development more appealing or be more open about what we are working on, please let us know.