Re: New project, code review request

[Emmanuel Rodriguez <emmanuel rodriguez gmail com>]

Savu Sorin Adrian wrote:
> Hello,
Hi welcome aboard.
>
> I'm new to this list, and and somewhat new to gtk && perl. Some time 
ago I started working on a todo list management tool. To my shame, most 
of the implementation is based on searching trough the limited code base 
of gtk-perl programs, translating from other programs (mainly Tasque) 
and "coding by coincidence". I would appreciate if some of the gurus of 
the perl-gtk project would take a look at my code and point out any 
flaws regarding coding, implementation .. etc.

I'm not my self a perl-Gtk guru so I will let the others give their 
opinion about your usage of the module. I will give you my input about 
the software it self.

I realize that these are your first lines of code in the project, at 
least that's what the svn history is telling. So there's no point at 
telling you about all the warnings printed at the console. I tried to 
execute your application and it's not possible because the program 
complains about the absence of the file ~/.tasks. You might want to skip 
the loading of the data file if it's missing.

You should think of a way for distributing your application. I strongly 
suggest that you package your application as a standard CPAN module and 
make it available there as well. This way you will provide the users 
with a simple way for installing your application. CPAN is not only for 
modules; you can add there applications too. You might need to change 
your package names in order to coexists with the other CPAN packages, 
although using a dedicated prefix should be enough. Even if you don't 
want to distribute your application through CPAN, you should at least 
package it as if it belong to CPAN.

I've read in your README and noticed that you want your application to 
work in Debian Etch. This is one more reason for packaging your 
application through CPAN. Doing so you will make it easier for us Debian 
and Ubuntu users to package your application as a deb package (take a 
look at the debian tool dh-make-perl it can do this automatically and 
without too much hassle).

If you want to package your application the CPAN way you will have to 
take care of bundling your external resources: images, glade files, 
desktop files, etc. I strongly suggest that you take a look at other 
Perl applications and see how they do it:

   Zim - good base since it's already packaged for Debian 
(http://zim-wiki.org/)
   Xacobeo - that's mine! (http://code.google.com/p/xacobeo/)
   All other applications listed here: 
http://gtk2-perl.sourceforge.net/links/

You can even provide a .desktop file and make your application available 
in the standard menu in the main desktop panel!

Cheers.