getting started

[Yuval Levy]

Hello, first time here, primarily scratching my own itches, might end up 
contributing if time and skills permit.

Kubuntu has been my primary desktop for three months and I love it. As with 
every desktop before, there are small things that I'd like to change. Rather 
than list them and beg a friendly soul to solve my problems, I thought I'd 
look under the hood myself.

I am looking for a jump start: how do I set my machine up to hack on Kubuntu? 
I've searched the web extensively, including KDE.org, and while I found plenty 
of tutorials and other interesting information, I did not find a sweet and 
short one that refer to this very specific situation:

First, starting from a plain vanilla Kubuntu install, I would like to get the 
source packages from apt, make small changes in there, and install a default 
Kubuntu from these self-built packages rather than from downloaded binary 
packages. I guess it is only a few lines in a terminal: sudo apt-get install 
<TOOLS, DEPENDENCIES, SRC-PACKAGES> && cd <SRC-TREE> && cmake <SOME_OPTIONS> 
&& make && make package && sudo dpkg -i PACKAGE

Then I would like to try to make minor changes, rebuild and install. The minor 
change I am thinking of presently is to add a preference in Dolphin for the 
copy behavior to mimic either cp (as it does now) or cp -a (as I would like it 
to do on my desktop and as Gnome's Nautilus has been doing for a while now). 
Patches/diffs at this stage would not be very helpful to KDE/Kubuntu, since 
they are against "old" source.

Later, I would like to have multiple concurrent versions of KDE on Kubuntu - a 
stable version to work with and a development version to hack on; with the 
development version coming from SVN - with an easy way to switch between them. 
This is when I expect to be able to start contributing patches upstream.

Did I miss something?

If there is already documentation available, please point me to the specific 
document(s) you recommend I read.

Otherwise, can you provide me with some guidance? I'll be happy to contribute 
back to the documentation to help jump start the next person in my situation.

Thank you in advance!
Yuv