Retrieving the source

The KDE project is Open Source, and the source code for development versions is freely available. It should be noted that the development sources are ALPHA quality and at times may not even compile - if you want stable sources then look at the source code distribution of the latest release. That said, the development versions usually work fine.

The KDE sources are managed using the CVS version control system (see the Tools section). Access to the repository is provided in several ways, namely:

• Anonymous CVS
  Anonymous CVS, provides a way to keep a current copy of the KDE source code.
• Code browsing
  Links to sites that offer various ways of examining the KDE source code online.
• Daily source snapshot (ftp.kde.org)
  The easiest way to get the sources (and probably the hardest to keep up to date) is to download one of the snapshots from the KDE ftp site.

Read-write CVS access is needed by anyone who needs to able to write to the repository. This includes developers, documentation writers, translators, artists etc. To get read-write access see the developer FAQ.