[gnome-flashback] Porting of deskbar-applet?

[Matteo Manighetti <m manighetti gmail com>]

Hello everybody

First a couple of lines to introduce myself. I am a student and a
discretely long time Linux user, but I have never actively partecipated
in the community. I have always been a GNOME user, but I was quite
disappointed with GNOME Shell. Needless to say, I really appreciate the
work that has been going on recently around gnome-flashback, and I have
been following developement on the mailing list for a while.

One thing I miss from the gnome2 times is the deskbar-applet. I felt
that a port to modern version of gnome, gnome-panel and related
technologies could be the opportunity for me to get to do something.
So as you may imagine I have a lot of things to ask, starting from the
most fundamental:
1- Is this too big of a project for an almost complete newcomer to
real-world (i.e. non study-related projects) and open source
programming?
2- Is this the right place to ask for advice?

I saw there is some documentation available for applet porting ([1],
[2]), and that there has been some time ago a port to the MATE desktop
([3]), although it seems now abandoned and forgotten.

If anybody has some advice, I would be very grateful

Matteo

[1] https://developer.gnome.org/panel-applet/stable/
[2] https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/GnomeGoals/AppletsDbusMigration
[3] https://github.com/benpicco/mate-deskbar-applet