Re: Bootstrapping tutorial

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2010-12-09 at 12:23 +0100, Pierre Wieser wrote:
> > Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 16:17:53 +0100
> > From: Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>
> > 
> > I would really appreciate people from this list having a quick glance
> > over it, help fill in any gaps in the tutorial, and build on Lennart's
> > work. I think it's pretty good (the stated goal was: "get someone with
> > a fresh Linux install to the point where they can compile GNOME software
> > as quickly as possible, and explain each step along the way, pointing
> > to further documentation if it's appropriate").
> 
> Hi
> 
> As a relatively new Gnome developer (less that two years I have got back
> Nautilus-Actions), and yet learning with Gnome tools (currently suffering
> with Gtk-doc), here are some free remarks:

Hi Pierre. Thanks for the feedback.

> - is it really useful to explain what a compiler is, or what a header
>   file is ?
>   if the future Gnome developer does not know about compiler, headers,
>   sources, libraries, I am afraid he is really far from his goal.

Agreed. At the developer documentation hackfest last week, we
talked quite a bit about our target audience for the new demos
and other material. We made a very deliberate decision that we
should not try to teach people programming or languages. If you
want to develop in C, learn C first.

> - a list of development packages sounds as needed in my opinion,
>   not only gcc, autotools, make, but also gtk-doc, docbook, libxml2,
>   gnome-doc-tools and so on.

Certainly. One of the nice things about doing your development in
Anjuta is that it takes care of much of this for you. And what it
doesn't do, we can always pester Johannes for. :)

> - maybe it would be interesting to have some lines about Gnome foundations,
>   as GLib, Gtk+, GObject.

This is probably best served by the Platform Overview, which will
soon be revamped and will be centrally featured on developer site.

> - I do not know if C is the first used language in Gnome applications,
>   but at least some words about other languages (Python, Mono, ...) and
>   their bindings may prevent some impervious persons to just go away :)

And as Johannes mentioned, we want to provide material for all the
major languages used for Gnome development, without any of them
seeming like afterthoughts. At the hackfest, we drafted an initial
set of demo tutorials and assigned each to somebody. Everybody was
allowed to do theirs in whatever language they wanted, and we will
later convert them all to all other languages.

> - Also, when I first took Nautilus-Actions on my favorite IDE, I would
>   like have just a set of up-to-date documentations about Gnome general
>   workflow, l10n and translator teams... There is some good pages for
>   what a maintainer should do, but developer documentation is just much
>   more scattered.

Indeed. And we have a plan to solve that. That includes new tutorials
and conceptual overviews, and delivering all the content (not just the
API references) in a developer help viewer.

I know what material I think we're lacking, but of course, I've been
around long enough that it's easy for me to miss things. I'd be very
interested in exactly what material you wish were easily available.

> - last but not least, is installing gedit in $HOME a really good idea ?
>   I thought ~/.local was the adequate place for this sort of thing ?

Yeah, installing to $HOME is kind of crazy.

Thanks,
Shaun