Re: [gnome-love] Revitalising gnome-love ... some history

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 08:36, chris wrote:
> I'm in the same position as Aaron.  Would love to start helping and am 
> currently working my way through Mattias Warkus' Gnome 2.0 
> book(German).  I could translate from German into English but don't know 
> how much of a use that is.  I'm not scared of shit jobs while I'm 
> learning the ropes.  What would be really helpful would be a list of 
> programs that are ideal for seeing how it is all put together.  Not to 
> difficult to grasp for us newbies.  Maybe a tutorial to go along with 
> it.  Does this already exist and I haven"t found it?

For GTK+, I would start by looking at the gtk-demo program (many
distributions packages this with gtk). The demo itself includes the
source code to each example. Alternatively, grab the GTK+ source code
and look in the examples/ directory. Note however, that none of those
demos use libglade to set things up, so some portions seem more tedious
than they could be. I gather that Mattias' book recommends using
libglade wherever possible, which is usually the easiest way of creating
GUIs.

For bonobo stuff, the tests directories in their respective source
tarballs contain some short examples of usage (which are not too
esoteric). For gnome-vfs, have a look at the programs/ directory for
some real-world usage.

You may think I am just saying "look at the tests for each module", but
this is not universally true. For example, the GTK+ tests/ directory is
not for (normal) human consumption -- it is meant to be a bunch of
torture tests and tricky cases, whereas the examples/ directory there is
meant for people to learn from. Not all modules have good examples.

For libgnome and libgnomeui, we are a bit short on good short examples.
I'm sure some exist, but they are not on the tip of my tongue.

If you just want to browse some code to see how things are put together,
I would recommend bug-buddy as a good start for a complete application
(start with the file src/bug-buddy.c). For an example of making a GTK+
widget that does some non-trivial work, gtksourceview is not a bad
example; start with gtksourceview/gtksourceview.c for the GTK+ class set
up and work outwards from there. Both of these are personal preferences
and I may be wrong about how easy they are to read (gtksourceview is,
admittedly, not easy. But it is fairly logical in its design).

I have a list somewhere on my machine of some other reference
information I have found around the place (although I am failing to find
it -- so I may have to look in my backups). I shall hunt it down and
post it for people.

For people who are not so much interested in C coding, I have some stuff
about documentation and some other language bindings, so never fear. It
will just take some a little while to pull everything together.

> Anyway, as mentioned before trying to get a grasp of all this is a 
> little overwhelming and any assistance would be welcome.

Hence the point of this list. :-)

Cheers,
Malcolm