[gnome-love] RE: gnome-love digest, Vol 1 #437 - 9 msgs

From: "Christopher Scoggin" <cscoggin earthlink net>
To: <gnome-love gnome org>
Subject: [gnome-love] RE: gnome-love digest, Vol 1 #437 - 9 msgs
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 14:43:04 -0700

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Subject: gnome-love digest, Vol 1 #437 - 9 msgs

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Revitalising gnome-love (news optimistic co uk)
   2. Re: GPOW (was Revitalising gnome-love ... some
       history) (Paolo Borelli)
   3. Re: Revitalising gnome-love ... some history (chris)
   4. Re: Revitalising gnome-love ... some history (textshell neutronstar dyndns org)
   5. Re: Re: Revitalising gnome-love (Malcolm Tredinnick)
   6. Re: Re: Revitalising gnome-love (Ross Golder)
   7. mailing list for gnome users (pclouds)
   8. Re: mailing list for gnome users (Calum Benson)

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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 17:04:57 +0000 (GMT)
From: news optimistic co uk
To: gnome-love gnome org
Subject: [gnome-love] Re: Revitalising gnome-love

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I like the look of all this - a few quick questions here, since I'm thinking of getting involved:

How acceptable is it to use pygtk for a program which you might like to be promoted by GNOME or even included 
in GNOME? How many bits of GNOME use it? Is it acceptable to combine it with libglade? My Python skills are 
fairly good, and I like the API.

Ditto for gtkmm, although it would mean I'd have to learn C++. What are the Java bindings like? Do enough 
people's machines _have_ Java support to make it practical? I don't even know how fast Java tends to run on 
non M$/Apple systems.

I tried gtk+ and C with code generated by glade, and that started getting a bit long in the code for short in 
the program, if you see what I mean. I might consider doing some stuff with C and libglade, if I don't find 
it too tough going, since the amount of time I have to spare is pretty unpredictable (I'm a student...).

The really irritating problem is that I have little or no CVS access, since I am behind a school firewall 
(AARRGGHH!!!). I might remedy this sooner or later, but for now I can't get access to CVS.

Despite this, I'd love to find somewhere to contribute. Any suggestions?

Regards,
-- 
Thomas Kirby

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Message: 2
Subject: Re: [gnome-love] GPOW (was Revitalising gnome-love ... some
        history)
From: Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>
To: Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>
Cc: gnome-love gnome org
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 19:43:04 +0100

What about proposing a GPOW (GNOME Project Of the Week) each week and see if there are any takers?

This would me much more manageable then a todo list since it would not get outdated. IIRC there are other 
projects which do this sort of thing, and we could look there to see how to make it work better.

IMHO the key factors in making it work are:

* the GPOW would be concorded with the maintainer so that, if done correctly, it would certainly go in.

* the GPOW would be chosen so that it would be of the right size/difficulty (e.g. do not require a deep 
understanding of the whole code of a module). Something like a sunday afternoon man work.

* the GPOW assignment would offer some initial guidance of how to get it done, in particular something very 
important is to tell _where_ the code to work on lives: it's often very frustrating reading thousands lines 
of code just to find the file where the things are.

Another things that would probably be useful is a #gpow IRC channel where developers of the module that is 
affected by the current GPOW can offer some guidance. Obviously this last thing is possible only if the 
developers have the time to do this kind of thing.

Just an idea...

ciao
        paolo

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Message: 3
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 22:47:48 +0100
From: chris <me blixtra org>
Cc: gnome-love gnome org
Subject: Re: [gnome-love] Revitalising gnome-love ... some history

Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:

On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 21:46, chris wrote:
[...]

Also, in response to Luis' response, I can't seem to find any team for
American english or simply english. Should I get in touch with the 
german team? I dare not translate into German, though.


Hmm .. maybe there are some crossed wires here. Luis was referring to 
the fact that Mathias Wirkus' book has already been translated into 
English. It is currently being proofread and will then be published.

You're right about the crossed wires there.


I gather you are asking about doing regular translations from German to 
English. As GNOME stands at the moment, there is not a lot of call for 
that, since the vast majority of our documentation and program messages 
are written originally in English and then translated into other 
languages. This is mostly for pragmatic purposes: for language XX, we 
only need to have a team translating from English->XX, we don't need to 
also have teams doing XX->English or XX->YY. Consequently there is no 
"English" team.


That's what I was thinking, hence the remark in my first posting.


There may be isolated cases when such translating talents are useful, 
but I cannot think of any of the top of my head. You may wish to drop 
into the gnome-i18n mailing list, though and at least introduce 
yourself. Alternatively, if you are comfortable using IRC, join the 
#i18n channel from time to time. The internationalisation guys are much 
more likely to know of such opportunities on the rare occasion that 
they arise.

Cheers,
Malcolm



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Message: 4
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 23:43:50 +0100
From: textshell neutronstar dyndns org
To: gnome-love gnome org
Subject: Re: [gnome-love] Revitalising gnome-love ... some history

On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 03:32:58PM -0500, Aaron Walker wrote:

First of all, glad to help start up some activity ;)  I would love to
contribute to GNOME some how, but I have no clue where to start.  I 
really would like to contribute some code, but I guess I will need to 
teach myself GTK+, etc before I am knowledgeble enough to write anything 
 useful.  I don't know that I really have any other special skills.  I 
know a little C and that's about it as of now.  I guess for now, I will 
be busy reading all the little tutorials and other docs that are 
available on developer.gnome.org


That was (and still is, except i don't have time these days) my situation, too.
But some while ago i learned that it is generelly not that difficult to get some
minor problems fixed. There are a lot lowhanging fruits here i think. And (maybe
i had luck) i got all my patches(execpt those that where duplicates) commited in
a short time. It's been much easier than i tought.
If something (not too big) annoys you, just check bugzilla and file a bug. And
if it isn't resolved in the next few days (maybe it's intentionally) try to fix
it.

just my 2 cents (Euro btw).


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Message: 5
Subject: Re: [gnome-love] Re: Revitalising gnome-love
From: Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>
To: gnome-love gnome org
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 10:55:54 +1100

On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 04:04, news optimistic co uk wrote:

I like the look of all this - a few quick questions here, since I'm thinking of getting involved:

How acceptable is it to use pygtk for a program which you might like to be promoted by GNOME or even 
included in GNOME? How many bits of GNOME use it? Is it acceptable to combine it with libglade? My Python 
skills are fairly good, and I like the API.


PyGtk is very acceptable, although currently no applications in the
desktop release use it and we don't ship it as part of the desktop
release. There is a chicken-and-egg thing with language bindings like
PyGTK and gtkmm -- until something comes along that seems worth shipping
in the desktop, the language bindings won't be shipped. Finally, it is
not just acceptable but strongly encouraged to use libglade. User
interfaces based on libglade are much more maintainable than those
constructed purely with code and will be more familiar to other people.

I would like to point out, though, that the building of new applications
is a bit off-topic for this list. The gnome-love charter is "giving love
to *existing* GNOME applications". So if we are going to have activity
on this list like in the old days, we are going to have to keep ontopic.
Of course, there is room to wiggle a bit here, since sometimes a new
application is what is required to fix something. But that is more the
exception that the rule.

Don't take that the wrong way, though -- I can see from the rest of your
mail that you are just scoping out the territory. :-)

Ditto for gtkmm, although it would mean I'd have to learn C++.
What are the Java bindings like? Do enough people's machines _have_ Java support to make it practical? I 
don't even know how fast Java tends to run on non M$/Apple systems.


For gtkmm, the answer is the same as for PyGtk. They are well-maintained
and well-respected bindings. There are good applications written using
both bindings and already available. We are waiting for something to
happen to give one or both bindings enough "critical mass" before
putting them into the main release. (That being said, I have a bias -- I
think the main GNOME release is already too big, so you won't see me
agitating for shipping more stuff, even though PyGtk is obviously the
language binding of the Gods. :-) And now Murray's going to flame me.)

As far as Java goes, it is highly unlikely that GNOME will ever ship
something that requires Java, simply because of licensing reasons (Java
is not open source and even with Sun's recent changes to the
distribution license for the Java runtime there are problems). However,
applications exist that use Java: for example, there the
java-access-bridge provides a link between Java applications and the
GNOME accessibility infrastructure. The currently best freely available
speech synthesiser for using with GNOME requires Java.

I tried gtk+ and C with code generated by glade, and that started getting a bit long in the code for short 
in the program, if you see what I mean. I might consider doing some stuff with C and libglade, if I don't 
find it too tough going, since the amount of time I have to spare is pretty unpredictable (I'm a 
student...).


Don't do that! Having glade generate C code was a mistake and using it
is now frowned upon and will not get you invited to high society
dinners.

Instead, the highly recommended method is to generate your UI using
glade and then use libglade to load the description at runtime and hook
up callbacks, etc. The code generated by glade itself is far from ideal
in a number of respects and is not maintained.

The really irritating problem is that I have little or no CVS access, since I am behind a school firewall 
(AARRGGHH!!!). I might remedy this sooner or later, but for now I can't get access to CVS.


For developing applications that use the GNOME platform, that is not
really a terrible thing. Developing against the released versions is a
safer bet in any case, since we provide a certain level of compatibility
between versions (we could do better, but as a general rule your code
will continue to work if developed for GNOME 2.x and then run on 2.y
where y > x).

Despite this, I'd love to find somewhere to contribute. Any suggestions?


We are working on it. Please hold the line. :-)

Cheers,
Malcolm


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Message: 6
Subject: Re: [gnome-love] Re: Revitalising gnome-love
From: Ross Golder <ross golder org>
To: news optimistic co uk
Cc: gnome-love gnome org
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 14:35:37 +0700

On à¸ž., 2003-11-12 at 00:04, news optimistic co uk wrote:

How acceptable is it to use pygtk for a program which you might like to be promoted by GNOME or even 
included in GNOME? How many bits of GNOME use it? Is it acceptable to combine it with libglade? My Python 
skills are fairly good, and I like the API.


Please don't. I do understand that people like using scripting languages
and sometimes they allow you to knock up applications fairly easily, but
IMHO I'd hate to see the core GNOME desktop starting to rely on loads of
intrepreted/scripted languages. It would add a huge amount of bloat to
an otherwise elegant design.

The GNU mission statement suggests that all programs should be written
in C. As GNOME is a effectively a kind of GNU subproject, I'd hate that
we start bending the rules in this area (or go too far down that road
that we can't turn back). For example, I noticed some time ago that the
GNUE project now uses Python fairly extensively. I think this is a real
shame, and has unfortunately has put me off using it, as I'd need to
learn yet another language in order to get to grips with it and start
developing/maintaining it. I'll probably eventually have to learn
Python, but I just don't have time right now. In fact, I'd probably
prefer to spend the time re-writing my own GNUE in C.

IMHO, C++ isn't so bad, as the GNU C compiler already works with that
quite well, so it doesn't require too much additional effort on the part
of future developers/maintainers and shouldn't add much bloat to the
code or binaries. Also, if I understand it correctly, converting C++ to
straight C after the event, if required, shouldn't be too hard either.

Scripting languages are great for small non-essential utilities etc that
are outside the scope of the core desktop, but please people, keep it C
wherever possible. Otherwise, I foresee we'll end up starting a
religious war over which is the official GNOME scripting language, and
that'll get even uglier.

Regards,

--
Ross




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Message: 7
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 18:31:52 +0700
From: pclouds <pclouds users sourceforge net>
To: gnome-love gnome org
Subject: [gnome-love] mailing list for gnome users

Hi,
I'd like to ask if there is a list for gnome users?
Thanks
-- 
Bi Cá» Lao

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Message: 8
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 13:28:16 +0000
From: Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>
Subject: Re: [gnome-love] mailing list for gnome users
To: pclouds <pclouds users sourceforge net>
Cc: gnome-love gnome org
Organization: Sun Microsystems Ireland Ltd

On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 11:31, pclouds wrote:

I'd like to ask if there is a list for gnome users?


This is probably the one you're after:
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems



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