tl;dr:

Contributing to KDE is currently a very frustrating experience for noobs like me. We should take steps to make contribution easier so we can get more people.

Goal
Make Contributing to KDE Easy.

Motivation

I started contributing to KDE this year. KWin has been the first project I've colaborated with people on, and the first project of such a large scale. Getting started contributing to KDE as a noob developer is an up hill battle that I almost didn't win, and many potential contributers don't win.

The current contribution process for development is a mess. kdesrc-build often doesn't work and finding dependancies on Neon is a huge pain. Projects like KWin and plasma-desktop frequently fail to build on my device (on average once a month) after a dependancy changes upstream. When I first started, I wasn't even able to get through the How-To-Develop page because kdesrc-build couldn't successfully build all the dependancies of plasma-desktop. I'M RUNNING ON NEON!!! It took me far longer than I'm willing to admit to manually fix all the packages leading up to plasma-desktop. My experience contributing to KDE has been tainted with the frustrations of things randomly not building and spending time researching about CMake and packages.

While I'm writing now, plasma-desktop has stopped building and I can't get my powerdevil build to start. This means instead of finishing off the logarithmic brightness for plasma or fixing bugs with the activity switcher panel so that activities aren't removed, I'm here trying to figure out why the hell those things stopped building!!!

KDE will always require more manpower than it has. Making contributing easier for people of all skill levels should very obviously be among our top priorities.

Plan

I don't know how to acheive this goal. To outline what I want to acomplish:

On any distro I could possibly be on, kdesrc-build builds any kde project, out of the box, like magic. Upstream dependancy changes never stop my local builds from working. If complete automation isn't possibe, a contributer needs to be informed, in a convenient, understandable format, what went wrong, why, and what to google to fix it.

A GUI for setting up and maintaining the development environment, even if it was just a frontend for kdesrc-build, would also be a great thing to have.

Community

I'm sure there are different ways to acheive this. I bet someone does though.

Risks and needs

This goal needs someone who knows more.

Champion

For various reasons, I would be a sufficient Champion for this goal. I encourage someone to step in here :)

Interest
This section is intended for people other than the Champion to sign up and show support for the Goal.
If you are interested to actively join the effort and do the work, add your name below (this does not count as voting for the Goal):