GTK+ Love

["Xan Lopez" <xan gnome org>]

Hi,
it's a pretty well known fact at this point that gtk+ has a severe
shortage of maintainers and developers. It's usually quite hard to get
strong contributors in any free software project, but big and complex
software like gtk+ only makes things worse :)
I've got two ideas in mind to try to improve the situation:
- The first one is to implement the well known gnome-love strategy
done by GNOME in gtk+. Basically we'd have a maintained list of "easy"
gtk+ bugs suitable for starting hackers to get involved into the
project. We would set up periodical IRC meetings where people could
join and ask questions about the bugs they're trying to fix to
experienced hackers. You know how it goes :) I met yesterday with some
igalians (www.igalia.com) and did a small trial of the idea, the
result can be seen here: http://live.gnome.org/GtkLove.
The important things to discuss, in order (and IMHO) are:
* Do we want to do this?
* If we do, is any maintainer willing to spend time at least reviewing
the list of bugs, even better reviewing the patches sent, and even
better attending the IRC meetings to help the newcomers? Me and others
will try to help those even less experienced than us, but the help of
the "old guard" is almost a must-have for the success of the
experiment I'd say.
* Do we want to store the data in gnome.org or gtk.org? use a wiki or
only bugzilla? or both? Discuss. :)

- The second idea: I've very recently gone through the beginning of
the process of becoming a GTK+ contributor. While the documentation
concerning the usage of the library is pretty good, the documentation
concerning the internals, design and philosophy of gtk+ is scarce,
outdated and fragmented. As a very needed complement to the list of
easy bugs there should be complete, up-to-date, official document with
the most basic concepts a wannabe gtk+ hacker should understand. I'm
not even talking about widget specific tips, but stuff like: how the
drawing model works, how size negotiation works, how the theming
works, the life cycle of a typical widget (a widget inside a
container), etc. There's good resources about all this topics (GGAD,
the docs/ dir, fragments of the API doc, random pages on the web (like
Federico's about the drawing model)).
I have some very small notes (mostly links to other places), but if
there's interest in this, specially from maintainers, I'd love to work
with others in an official document. As a first step we could ask
people which topics they generally find hard to understand about the
way gtk+ is designed.

That's all for now.

Cheers, Xan