From August, 28th to September, 1st, 1997, some KDE developers met in Arnsberg, Germany, to discuss design issues, the future of the project, and - of course - to code a lot. Some areas in which a lot of progress has been made are KFM stability, internationalization and mime-type detection. In addition, work in progress has been presented and discussed.

Sponsors

Sponsors that helped with money donations

Sponsors that helped with Internet access, machines and logistic and organizational support

Discussion results

• We are not sure if we want or need distributed objects, but if we do, Corba (in its incarnation Korba) is the way to go.

• We already have a great mechanism for embedding applications into each other: KParts. (More on this later).

• We need a list of keybindings that are obligatory for all KDE-applications. Such a list has been proposed and will be published later on this web site.

• The old filesystem structure has proven to be unsatisfactory. A new one has been proposed and will be published later on this web site.

• All KDE applications should be internationalized. In order to internationalize your application, you only have to include klocale.h and kapp.h in every source file that needs strings and replace all occurrences of fixed strings with klocale->translate( "string" ). Stephan Kulow, Kalle Dalheimer and our translators will then do the rest. If you want to help with the translations, please contact Stephan Kulow.

• We need more and better documentation. A user's and a programmer's guide are already on the way. As soon as Taj has finished kdoc, the HTML documentation of the library will be included in every KDE distribution.

• In order to make the applications not in the base distributions better known, we will include the components page in the help tree of every KDE distribution.

Thanks