Proposal for GNOME Developers' Guide

[John R Sheets <dusk smsi-roman com>]

So, I finally got DocBook up & running on my system (the long
wait was due more to distractions than technical
difficulties...although it would have gone much worse without
Mark Galassi's pre-bundled tool set--thanks again, Mark!).

Here's my first pass at the overall structure for a GNOME
Developer's Guide documentation suite.  It's in a pretty lean
DocBook format (it won't parse properly, due to incomplete tag
sections, e.g. missing sections in the chapter blocks).  At this
point, I'm posting it more for debate over the content, than for
markup evaluation (though I'm happy to receive comments on
either). I am aware that it's incomplete, and left it that way
deliberately to make it easier to read.

The intent of the dev-guide is to provide developers with
discussions and tutorials of how the internals of the GNOME
code-base works and interacts.  It would be more free-form,
organized by concept, as opposed to file/directory structure.  It
would be a supplement to the auto-generated API reference docs
that Scott Wimer has been working on.

In a Nutshell:

------
Book #1: GNOME Libs
  Part 1: Back End (libgnome, etc.)
  Part 2: Front End (libgnomeui)

Book #2: Core GNOME Components
  Part 1: Panel
  Part 2: Control Center
  Part 3: Help System

Book #3: GNOME Communication
  Part 1: Baboon
  Part 2: WWW libs (gnome-xml/dom, etc.)
  Part 3: Sound

Book #4: ORBit

Book #5: GNOME Language Bindings

Book #6: GNOME Applications
------

Attached is the DocBook file.  Let me know what you think; I'll
try to get started writing on it ASAP.

John

gdevguide.sgml