[gedit-list] Confusion writing a Gedit plugin

[Tony Nelson <tonynelson georgeanelson com>]

I'm having a confusing time trying to clone the (old style) Gedit sample
plugin for Gedit 2.8.1.  I'm new to Linux, and (obviously) new to Gnome
development.  I'm running Fedora Core 3.  I attempted to search the list
archives, but (as usual) searching doesn't work, with neither "plugin" nor
"sample" being found; Google seems able to search but didn't turn up
anything relevent.

I first tried installing the Gedit source from the CVS tree, but found that
it required various things newer than in FC3, or even FC4.  At my stage of
understanding, that approach seemed like a bad idea, so I rm'd the CVS
sources and got the FC3 source rpm.  It may be that I should remove other
things as well?

I then installed the Gedit source rpm from FC3 (downloaded from Fedora site
into ~, rpm -i'd into my own ~/rpmbuild dir, rpmbuild  --recompile -bp),
./configure'd and make'd it, and it seemed to build correctly.  Then the
confusion started.  Possibly I have somehow managed to mix versions of
stuff when I first tried to use the Gedit source from the main CVS tree.

I've been following the directions at
<http://live.gnome.org/GeditPluginHowto> , but apparently extra steps are
needed to turn the changed or new Makefile.am and configure.in files into
Makefile and configure.  <http://developer.gnome.org/doc/GGAD/ggad.html>
describes how to create the source tree, more or less, and, with some
typing of info <cmd> and <cmd> --help and general fooling around I found
that the additional steps I needed to do were:

aclocal
automake
autoconf ./configure.in >configure
./configure

and then I had Makefiles and could proceed.  Well, I ran aclocal because
automake complained that I had an old version of ??? (unfortunately
scrolled off of my scrollback when I first ran autoconf ./configure.in) and
that I should do aclocal.  Actually it meant "must", which held me up for a
while.  After that automake worked, producing Makefile.in's.  autoconf
seems to be needed to make the configure file, but its result had a line
GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS(yes) that was not accepted.  ./configure finally
produced the new Makefiles, and make worked.

This all seems much harder than it probably is supposed to be, so I'm
probably not doing it right.  The docs I've read don't seem to have all the
necessary steps.  I think that my difficulties aren't peculiar to writing a
plugin for Gedit.  Are there better docs?  What are the proper steps to
follow when making a new plugin?

Now I want to install the plugin into Gedit.  I don't see how to do that
(either).  Copying all the likely files from my plugin's source dir into
~/.gedit-2/plugins didn't seem to be quite enough, as the checkbox for it
in Edit menu Preferences dialog Plugins tab is disabled.  Where should I
put the new plugin's files?
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:'                       <mailto:tonynelson georgeanelson com>
      '                              <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>