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API documentation & refactored kdelibs/kdeui

Wednesday, 27 December 2006 | Dominik Haumann


During the last weeks/days the directory structure of especially kdelibs/kdeui got a major overhaul: in KDE 3 all files of a module were in the same directory which was more or less a mess as you did not know immediately which files belonged to the same category. kdelibs/kdeui in KDE4 has a rather clean structure now (similar to the one in Qt) by using subfolders like

  • actions
  • dialogs
  • widgets
  • xmlgui
  • several others…

Compare this to KDE3’s kdelibs/kdeui structure. For KDE4 this is a huge benefit, as we have clearly defined groups. We already had lots of discussions in the past about API documentation and this is exactly where the new structure is important: In Qt every class usually belongs to a group (example). Our API documentation tool doxygen of course supports grouping, and now it is even easy to know which class should be in which group. For instance, all classes in the widgets directory should be in the ‘Widgets‘ group, and then maybe even more fine-grained divided into sub-groups.
By the way, we have a policy that every widget in kdelibs has a screenshot to immediately see how it looks like – another nice way to get involved :)
All in all this is really awesome and I’d like to thank all involved developers. Next prey is kdelibs/kdecore? =)