“KDE is one of the largest Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
projects. It follows the typical ‘distributed development’ model
used by many other FOSS applications. More than 1.200 developers
around the planet have accounts and credentials to access its
central source code repository. This repository currently holds
more than 4 million lines of program code, translations of
approximately 100,000 user interface strings (and many more lines
of application manuals) into more than 80 different languages.
Every day there are about 300 or more ‘commits,’ adding new or
modifying existing content.“Any software project of this size and scope can only prosper
and go forward if it uses tools that are good enough to manage and
build all its code, for all its contributors, on all supported OS
and CPU platforms, all the time, without major problems. Oftentimes
‘good enough’ here translates into: ‘the best one that is available
for our purposes…'”