Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Jud Craft <craftjml gmail com>]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 5:35 AM, Andrew Savory wrote:
> Focusing in on one area that I can talk about: Qt is perceived by some to be stronger from a business 
> perspective due to the 'more complete' offering: extensive documentation and an SDK.
>
> Perhaps more focus on and promotion of GNOME's developer tools/sdk offerings would be a useful meta-goal 
> for the coming year? Somehow enunciating the proposition that you don't need to be an alpha-dog developer 
> to get engaged with GTK etc.
>
> For example, I only recently found out about Anjuta: it's presumably a fairly important tool for people 
> developing using GNOME technologies, but look at the results at 
> http://www.google.com/search?q=anjuta&as_sitesearch=www.gnome.org (Yes, I know there's a ton of stuff at 
> library.gnome.org, I'm being devil's advocate here ...)


Looking at Anjuta, I have no idea if it's a great resource to start
GTK programming with or not.  You say yourself "presumably", and
that's the greatest nail in the coffin - you're obviously involved in
GNOME development and you have *no* idea, you're barely familiar with
it either.  Otherwise I'm pretty sure you'd use words a little less weasely
about it.

You don't have to be an alpha dog to realize that GNOME has no blessed
development workflow.



Currently I don't program in GNOME/GTK.  I have no idea how people
actually *are*, since GNOME has (almost by intention) no approved
development environment (a liveCD full of every Linux development tool
known does not count).  I assume most of them are probably just
writing their code by hand in Vi and passing esoteric arguments to
GCC.  Serious, I have no idea how real GNOME developers program in
GNOME - and my guesses aren't flattering.  [If it's anywhere near my
guess, then no, I won't be programming in GNOME anytime soon.  And I
can use Vi just fine, and GCC with some effort.]

In other words, I think I have to be an alpha-dog developer, and
nothing I've seen convinced me otherwise.  There's just too much crud
to wade through, pulling together API references, documents on GUI
design, etc. (I still have no idea what GtkBuilder is, and if I should
even still try making a GUI in Glade or not.  I hope you guys really
don't write the XML by hand now.)  And any tutorial that
starts with describing how to manage and link my object files on the
command line isn't going to convince me otherwise.