Re: [gnome-love] development

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 1/13/06, Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com> wrote:
> 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

Another link, which I think is underused:
  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/reports/gnome-love.cgi
that will take you to bugs marked by developers as being good projects
for people getting started.

In particular, I'd like to point out
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=317405; I'm looking for a
volunteer to fix that one--I pointed out the function that needs to be
modified so that you don't need to search a big module for the right
place to get started.  :)

<snip>
> 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.

If you know you are interested in a certain project, the project's
overview page (e.g.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=gossip) should prove
helpful.  It also contains a link (in the column at the right) to the
bugs for that product from the list I pointed out in the gnome-love
link above; of course, you can also try your hand at fixing any of the
other bugs as well and that page can help you look for them by
category more easily.

<snip>

> 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).

My personal opinion is that this should be modified to read "it's not
so hard -- after you've already done it a couple times".  It's useful
to have others around to help you through the first time or two,
especially those that have built it recently and are familiar with the
recent issues.  Thus, staying on IRC and asking questions, in addition
to reading through a guide on building from CVS, can be quite helpful.

However, it does take quite a bit of time, especially compared to the
amount of time new people typically want to put in.

> 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

Metacity is a good example of this; your distro need not be too up to
date (Gnome 2.10 with the associated devel libraries is good enough)
and you should still be able to build it from cvs without having to
build any other modules from cvs.  There are probably a number of
other examples too; most at the application level but you could also
get the same effect by going low enough in the library stack.  :)


Cheers,
Elijah