Re: How do I switch to Sawfish??

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Ali,

On Mon, 2002-09-02 at 11:04, Ali Akcaagac wrote:
> But sometimes you don't have much time and need to do stuff quickly.

	Fair enough;

> the fast growing and changing libraries as the gnome ones really
> require better documentation.

	I'd appreciate help with massaging the libbonobo[ui] doc build into
some sort of shape; send me patches, and/or I'll help you get setup.
Ultimately writing and checking the docs is a long painstaking process.

> yes, this was of course an example of mine, not well choosen but now i
> could come up and argue, so if i unref until the counter reaches zero
> then can i use GnomeVFSURI as a kind of stack ? like stacking refcounts
> on it. now how will you answer if you don't know nothing about it. you
> will be able to answer (as part of the one who wrote the library).

	I don't understand the question in fact; so I don't know what's going
on. Of course - to program in a powerful/limited language like C - you
need some grasp of some basic patterns - such as 'ref counting'.

> oki i don't want to nail you down with these examples now but i want to
> point out in general that there are always questions open where you need
> answers too.

	You're quite right - and this is why I recommend getting good at first
pin-pointing the question you really want answered, then finding it out
yourself; if you can do that repeatedly you're going to get good
quickly.

>  you for example are quite good into that stuff because you
> learned the api from ground up over time

	Sure; but with the skills I learned from that I can tackle other large
code-bases and hopefully learn them quicker, it was not wasted time. I
simply contend that in the time you read 20 lines of printed
documentation, you can read 100 lines of code - and you'll have a better
impression of what the code does, and how it works, and you'll be able
to read the next chunk even quicker :-)

>  but now get yourself into the
> situation where you need to learn the api. you can guess what these
> functions are meant to do, you can investigate into the types, structs,

	Yep - and you soon learn that all code is very much alike.

> you spent and investigate more into learning
> the libraries and need to guess why are things the way they are than
> writing your own application.

	Sure - but then you don't need to understand the thing in total, you
can just read a header; and search for a few methods that give you the
types you're interested in so you can manipulate the objects you want.

	Really - it's not that hard.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot