Re: New developer...

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Thanks for your interest in working on GTK+.

It's a little difficult to get involved in GTK+ development, since
it's a large and complicated project, and we're pretty careful about
adding new API to it.

For the GTK+-2.0 cycle, we've basically have the complete list of
features we want in the release finalized at this point, and major
changes to widgets are not on that list.

After that release, there will most likely be a GTK+-2.2 release,
hopefully withind in a year, which will include things like a revised
menu API and additional new or reworked widgets.

If you want to get involved in GTK+ development at this point,
probably the easiest thing to do is to go to bugzilla.gnome.org and
query on bugs for the "2.0.0" milestone for the gtk+ product.

These are non-API affecting bugs and it should be reasonably easy to
get patches that fix these bugs integrated.

(The bugs on the "2.0.0 API Freeze" milestone affect the API, and thus
the solutions for them need more discussion and involvement from the
core developers.)

The file selector is schedule for a major rewrite in that development
cycle of GTK+ and some people have been working on replacements. For
that reason, we aren't taking small changes right now; you may want to
look through the archives of this mailing list to find some of the
prototypes and patches people are working on for this.

Regards,
                                        Owen

Marcelo Elias Del Valle <marceloelias iname com> writes:

> Hi.
> 
> I am brazilian, so please sorry if you misundertand me in some...
> 	By now, i just subscribed the mailing list. I am starting to hack gtk+ source code and I am liking so much of the lib concepts. However, I think gtk interface is yet a bit ugly and the widgets and very few customizable yet...
> 	I understand there are much other much important things to be done on gtk+ before widgets development be a worrie, but I would like to develop some on gtk+ on this part. I would like to add features to some of actual gtk+ widgets and create new ones.
> 	I started on linux programming over 3-4 years ago. Before, I was a
> windows delphi/visual basic/c++ builder programmers. Bad days... Now, I see
> gtk+ is much better in phylosophy that any other tool I alredy programmed, but
> I know, also, some of the features that RAD (Rapid Application Development) programmers should expect from gtk widgets...
> 	There are some functions that the widgets should do itself. I didn't
> understand why gtkfilesel doesn't have a filter selection, for example... Even
> if it should have a mime type selection that allows the user filter files by
> content and not only extension, it should be some filter alredy...
> 	What I am trying to say is gtk+ needs some basic features (in my
> opinion) I would like to implement, but I don't know if I am trying to do it the
> right way... 
> 	I would like your help/opinion about. Do you think I develop some gtk+
> widgets and add features to others could be a good idea? I know very few of
> gtk+ entire source by now, so I would like to start developing this way. When
> I be more accostumed with the source, I could help some other ways I also have
> interest...