Re: [gnome-love] development

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

Hi Sean,

        first of all let me give you some useful link ti get started:

http://live.gnome.org/JoinGnome
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove 
http://www.gnome.org/~newren/tutorials/developing-with-gnome


As you note, the best thing is getting started with contributing to an
app that you like and that you use: you can get in touch with developers
of such an app by finding them on irc and by subscribing to the relevant
mailing list. Another thing you can do is to check the current bugs
filed in bugzilla.gnome.org for such an application and see if there is
something you want to fix.

Since you seem to be interested in lowlevel stuff, I suggest some
projects like HAL[1], gnome-volume-manager, gnome-power-manager,
NetworkManager, gnome-bluetooth etc with deal with the boundary between
drivers/HW and the desktop.

[1] Hardware Abstraction Layer, this is not specific to gnome and is
hosted on freedesktop.org


About building from cvs, it may seem a little dounting at the beginning
but it's not so hard: there is a build script named jhbuild which may be
very helpful (the links I gave you have more info about it).
Beside you don't need to build everything from cvs, you may just build
the base libraries (glib, gtk, etc) and the app you plan to work on
(usually installing in a separate prefix) and continue to run your
distro's desktop. Depending on how uptodate your distro is and which app
you want to work on, you may even skip building the libraries and use
the distro's devel packages


Hope that helps,

ciao
        Paolo