Re: Reporting for duty

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 05:46, Craig Keogh wrote:
> Resending. Maybe got spam filtered (?).
> -- 
> Craig Keogh <cskeogh bigpond net au>
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________
> From: Craig Keogh <cskeogh bigpond net au>
> To: Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>
> Subject: Re: [gnome-love] Reporting for duty :)
> Date: 01 Sep 2004 19:41:11 +0930
> 
> On Sat, 2004-08-28 at 13:56, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > On Fri, 2004-08-27 at 21:42 -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:
> > > On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Erling Matthiesen wrote:
> > > > Im a 9th semester student in distributed real time systems (network
> > > > engineering). I mainly work with c-programming or shell-scripting to
> > > > evaluate logfiles from simulations but think doing something graphical
> > > > could be exciting. Are there any "easy" projects I could help out?
> > > 
> > > Let me just take a minute to give a word of advice as someone who was
> > > getting started not all that long ago.  Sometimes alpha-quality
> > > software is much easier to work on as a beginner than software that is
> > > older and more stable.
> > 
> > Although Yelp is a fairly old project, I've made grest strides in making
> > sure that it's alpha-quality.  This makes it a wonderful project for
> > people who are just getting started with Gnome development.  I'm on IRC
> > all the time.  If you want something to do, just ask.
> > 
> > --
> > Shaun
> > 
> 
> Shaun,
> 
> I would like to help with Yelp. I'm trying to catch you on IRC but you're asleep.
> I'd prefer to help with programming or documentation. Anything you can throw this way?
> I'm just getting started, so nothing too difficult.

I'm CCing gnome-doc-list on this so others can see all this.  This also
increases the chances that somebody will reply to questions, since it
seems pretty obvious that I'm not being very quick about it.

I'm sorry.  Your email has been sitting in my "need to reply to this"
list for quite some time.  I've had a really hard time with the 2.8
documentation, so I haven't had any time for Yelp development issues.

Here's my tentative plan for Yelp 2.8, which will be in 2.10:

- Finish gnome-doc-utils, and switch Yelp over to it.
- Switch to using gtkmozembed (gecko) for the HTML rendering.
- Finish the new man page converter and plug it in.
- Finish the new info converter and plug it in.

Additionally, these could make it in, with enough contributors:

- Develop new fd.o shared help system and switch Yelp to it.
- Implement full text and/or index term search.
- Implement print support.

More wishy-washy ideas, without a concrete plan:

- Figure out a mechanism for topical inter-linking of documents, so that
  Yelp can automatically suggest related documentation for any topic.
- Figure out a way to put an intro page into documents, so that users
  can start off with something less intimidating than the TOC.
- Determine what's needed for better accessibility on the documentation.
  There's no reason everything has to be munged through HTML.  We have
  the complete DocBook for every document; we can probably do some cool
  stuff, and this might finally calm the DocBook nay-sayers.

I know there's more stuff.  I should probably keep a web page with all
this stuff.  In fact (and this means a lot coming from me, believe me),
this would be a great use for a wiki.

To get started, you should just familiarize yourself with the code base.
I know it sounds trite, but I really think trolling through bugzilla is
a good way to do this.  Go look for some crashes and leaks (there are
quite a few filed by Morten Welinder) and try to fix them.  It's not all
that glamorous, but it's a good way to learn how the various pieces of
code fit together.

I'm on a sort of mini-vacation from Gnome stuff.  I won't be on IRC for
a little while, and I don't plan to do any real Gnome work for at least
a week.  But I'm still reading and replying to email.

--
Shaun