Re: [gnome-love] newbie at 6 oclock

[Luis Menina <liberforce fr st>]

> Hi all, I decided to change to GNOME (as a desktop user) 10 months ago
> (used fluxbox).
> Most of the people I know use KDE. My decision was rather
> philosophical than technical. AFAIK GNOME is the official GNU desktop
> environment.

Hi arkano!

> If I'm gonna help, it will be definitely here :).
>
> Well, I've read almost all the suggestions I've found on the
> gnome-love's wiki and developer.gnome.org site.

Just a warning: developer.gnome.org is supposed to die, because there is 
too much update data. So if a document feels a bit old, it may mostly be 
outdated. Freshest stuff is in the wiki.
http://live.gnome.org/Developer.Gnome.Org_Must_Die

> It might looks like I'm going too fast but I just want to take another
> approach as to learning GNOME as a whole (very different to "at once")
> rather than writing a basic application with libgnome/ui or with
> libglade as many tutorials suggest.

Libglade is good, libgnome and libgnomeui are bad. These are going to be 
deprecated and replaced by newer stuff directly in GTK.
The integration to GTK of usefull software components in same the 
Project Ridley:
http://live.gnome.org/ProjectRidley
See also http://live.gnome.org/LibgnomeMustDie

> So I first want to get the "overview" of the architecture. (yes there
> is a tutorial on this topic, I've skimed it [1] ).
> I've attached a graphic I found describing the dependencies of the
> architecture. I have a few questions about it:
>
> 1) Is it up to date ? If not, can anyone point me to an updated one ?

It's mostly up to date, except maybe for some stuff: the printing API 
moved from GNOME to GTK. Search "print" here,
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/index.html . You can also 
search "migrating" and see some guides to replace old-fashioned ways to 
do things by newer ways...
Give a look to http://live.gnome.org/BestPractices

> 2) Suppose I want to write an application which creates some file and
> put "hello world" in it. I could do it using Bonobo or GnomeVFS
> separately, is that right ?

Or other stuff. But nowadays, Bonobo is evil, too complicated and has 
bad performance for simple stuff. GnomeVFS has some flaws and is subject 
to be rewritten. It is also considered too complicated to use, and event 
GNOME applications don't use it extensively.

> 3) If I can do what is described above or something alike, was it a
> "coincidence", or it's how the development team thinks about the
> architecture (i.e. giving developers more than a way of doing things)
> ?
The tendency is to have one single and strong way of doing things, and 
avoid multiple libraries dependencies when not necessary (that's why 
libgnome is dying).

> 4.1) How will that graphic be like the next years ?
Think Project Ridley

> 4.2) Where is the development team aiming at in the long term ?
Check out Project Topaz: http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero

> 4.3) What are the most difficult problems right now on the architecture 
> if any ?

I'd say the Vfs Layer, but may be wrong.

> Those are some questions I couldn't guess from reading the documents I
> read and the graphic here attached. Maybe I'd know their answers (4.x
> in particular) if I was a developer :/
>
> I've also read about Orbit2 and Bonobo but I think I'm gonna get more
> in depth to them as I need it.

Well, give up Orbit and Bonobo if you want to feel sane :-)

> I'm trying to learn the "what"s and "where"s of GNOME instead of the 
> "how"s.
>
> So if someone can help me, it will be appreciated. New suggestions are 
> welcome!
>
> cheers
> arkaino.
>
> [1] 
> http://developer.gnome.org/doc/guides/platform-overview/platform-overview.html