KStars Workout

From WorkOutWiki2009

Contents 1 Proposer 2 Introduction 3 Tasks 3.1 Junior Jobs 3.2 Alternative big goal 4 Pre-requisites 5 Reference URLs 5.1 Getting in touch 6 Participants 7 Result

Proposer

Prakash Mohan

Prakash Mohan ('praksh' on IRC) is an undergraduate student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He has been an active KDE developer for over an year now and works mainly on KStars - the Desktop Planetarium for KDE. Being an amateur astronomer, he worked on the Observation Planner in KStars as a part of his Google Summer of Code project this year, to make astronomy observation outings a better experience. He is an active member of the KDE India community and the open source community at IITM, and has been instrumental in organizing the Hackfest at IITM's technical fest.

Introduction

KStars is a Desktop Planetarium for KDE. It provides an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time. The display includes upto 100 million stars, 13,000 deep-sky objects, all 8 planets, the Sun and Moon, and thousands of comets and asteroids.

This KStars' WorkOut will be a session aimed at squashing bugs, adding new features along with code revamps in KStars.

Tasks

Junior Jobs

Implementing some of the following junior jobs:

  * Debug the Sky Calendar
  * Comets that looks like comets
  * Fix the inconsistencies with comets
  * Fix all the translation bugs
  * Fix the Alt. vs. Time night time bug
  * FindDialog betterment
  * Wipe out other bugs reported in bugzilla

Detailed descriptions at http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Edu/KStars/JuniorJobs

Alternative big goal

Work towards the community integration project for KStars

• http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2009/Ideas#Project:_Community_Integration_for_KStars

Pre-requisites

• A working knowledge of C++ and object oriented programming.
• Prior experience with the Qt and KDE API.
• Ability to comfortably use a debugger/IDE.
• A functional KDE build system with updated sources.

Reference URLs

• Project website
• Code Base (websvn)
• Setting up the KDE build system

Getting in touch

• The KStars mailing list
• IRC channels: [On freenode] #kstars #kde-edu #kde-devel
• Individuals attending FOSS.IN prakash (dot) mohan (at) kdemail (dot) net and akarshsimha (at) gmail (dot) com

Participants

• Prakash Mohan (WorkOut Lead)
• Akarsh Simha (Project Maintainer)
• Sivaramakrishnan Swaminathan
• Vinay Ishwar Hegde
• Jain Basil Aliyas
• Anirudh
• Vignesh Raju
• Sruthi

Result

The KStars WorkOut turned out to be a KDE Build System workout. Many got started on the build systems and some even completed setting up the build system. Now, participants can contribute to code. Though on a short term, there was no work done on KStars, we hope the ones with the build system now will contribute and make up for it.