Re: contributing to f-spot

[Ruben Vermeersch <ruben savanne be>]

On Sat, 2010-06-05 at 01:24 +0200, Paul Lange wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> I would like to contribute to f-spot. Recently I saw that you're working
> on cleaning up the codebase. Are there some easy tasks to start with?
> Anything somebody who isn't used to the codebase can complete?
> 
> Another thought: f-spot's sources looks rather chaotic in comparison to
> other projects (for example banshee) which makes stepping in harder then
> necessary. Wouldn't it be clever to rebase f-spot on the hyena library
> to benefit from this functionality and furthermore split functionality
> in smaller, more independent parts? What do you think?

Hi Paul, good to hear you again!

That is exactly what we are doing right now! F-Spot from git right now
pulls in Hyena and we are gradually replacing things that have a Hyena
equivalent in F-Spot by the thing that's in Hyena. While doing this,
things are slowly getting cleaned up.

For instance, we had Peter Goetz cleaning up our console output by
switching to Hyena.Log. Mike Gemünde redid our build system by using the
banshee build scripts (work in progress) and he is planning to replace
our database code soon (which is a hard task, respect for that).

The source tree is indeed chaotic and we should start reorganizing it.
This again is a tedious task: it's hard to detangle things and patches
will break if we change too much at the same time.

There are certainly things you can do, I should make a list of easy to
approach tasks (or occasionally send them out to the list), but for now
just come over and have a chat on IRC. From the top of my head, I think
there's opportunity to replace our home-grown command line parsing code
by the cleaner CommandLine stuff in Hyena.

Cheers,
  Ruben