Re: [gnome-love] my participation

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 10:27:03AM -0800, Josh Steiner wrote:
> good to hear.  :)  
>
> so once again, any further suggestions for available projects are very
> welcome, i've got the time, the dev environment built and rearing to go,
> the coding knowledge, but no project :)
>
> in the mean time, i will see if anyone is working on XBill, that is
> definitely a 2.0 blocker...

Man, Josh, your enthusiasm is still there, for sure! :)

OK, here are a few suggestions I have just come up with that are fairly
accurate (I spend enough time hanging around mailing lists and irc to
have a feeling for what people are working on):

(1) Gtkhtml2 is about to become the centre of attention. This is because
it's an almost-ready GNOME 2 HTML layout widget, so people are wanting
to use it for help browsers and the like. Unfortunately, both of the
current maintainers are pretty busy on other things (including school),
so they don't have time to iron out the kinks. So a bunch of people are
now starting to jump in and try to get all the little warnings and
problem test cases sorted out. As of right this minute, gtkhtml2 from
CVS builds properly against the GNOME 2 platform, but it spews warnings
all over the place and a number of the tests fail. This is a case of
lots of people jumping in and fixing little bits to stabilise it and
sending patches to the maintainers.

(2) Go to your GNOME 1 Applets menu (the applets that sit in the panel),
pick one and start porting. For GNOME 2, there will be some key applets
in the gnome-core package and a bunch of other applets in the
gnome-applets package (rumours of a gnome-clocks package are
unsubstantiated :-) ). Porting applets will require building gnome-core
from CVS (it builds and works, sort of), then reading some code and some
of the docs and then doing a fairly simple porting job. If you get stuck
on this, either ask on here, or on gnome-2-0-list gnome org or jump on
IRC and talk to people like markmc or gman or vicious, since they are
actively coding away on the panel now).

(3) Not a lot of the games are being ported yet. Pick one, contact the
maintainer directly to find out the status and go. In fact, let me
suggest a likely candidate: Same Gnome. Two of three authors are Ximian
guys (Miguel and Federico) who should hopefully already be too busy for
words, so the odds of it being ported already are slim.

If I can think up any more ideas, I'll post them here.

I have also been trying to organise a list somewhere of who is porting
what. For the big applications, this is already up at
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/modules/, but that list is not yet
tracking things like panel applets. I will keep trying to get something
done about that, or we are going to have more near-accidents like two
people trying to port memprof at the same time. There's enough porting
work to go around, it just takes some organising (and there's barely
enough time for that).

Cheers,
Malcolm

-- 
Honk if you love peace and quiet.