Developers! Developers! Developers! [LWN.net]

Developers! Developers! Developers!

Posted Aug 23, 2012 20:42 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)
Parent article: GUADEC: GNOME OS conversations

Perhaps the GNOMEs might want to make it easier to develop for what exists now before abandoning all that to go chasing the next rainbow.

It is all well and good that GTK+ does the automagic binding thing to every known language. Better still would be documentation on how to use ONE of them. If you were trying to bring up a new programmer, what documentation would you use?

I have beat this one to death here in the past but it really can't be repeated enough. Documentation is as important as code.

I can find a basic programming in Python + Gtk document. But Gtk != GNOME. It won't show you how to get full i18n support, attach to dconf, dbus, etc. It won't show you the 'right' way to produce a program that complies to the GNOME coding standards, leverages all of the current GNOME technologies and will have (perhaps) a shot at running with the next version with minimally invasive changes.

Perl? Java? Only very old very outdated docs. C of course has the reference docs... but you better like reading em on a web browser because you don't get a local copy in devhelp anymore. And it ain't written as a tutorial.

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Developers! Developers! Developers!

Posted Sep 5, 2012 18:47 UTC (Wed) by pixelpapst (guest, #55301) [Link]

Have you seen https://live.gnome.org/GObjectIntrospection/Doctools ?

Developers! Developers! Developers!

Posted Aug 24, 2012 17:07 UTC (Fri) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]

> If you were trying to bring up a new programmer, what documentation would you use?

What I do (and I think it's common) is to download and read the source for some official Gnome applications, like gnome-terminal or sound-juicer. If I'm doing something weird, I'll grab the Gimp. If I'm using C#, I'll grab Banshee.

It's not great, but for something as large as Gnome, I can't see a tutorial being all that useful.

Developers! Developers! Developers!

Posted Aug 24, 2012 17:34 UTC (Fri) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]

Great. So if you are an experienced C programmer who can read and understand the source to The GIMP you can code a simple GNOME app.

You have a new programmer. They know some Python, Java or whatever. With the magic in Gtk+ and such every machine has bindings for those languages. Heck, RedHat and pretty much everyone and their dog does all the small fiddly bits in Python these days. So what do you point that new to GNOME (and probably Linux) programmer at to get them up to speed.

And if you can't see a tutorial on how to code a simple program as even possible, isn't that a huge problem?

Now you know why I still reach up to the shelf over my desk and grab _Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk_ anytime I need to bang out a quick graphical thing. Every time I consider jumping to GNOME with either Perl or trying some Python... but get daunted by the wall I'd have to climb over and just use what has documentation. Pretty sure I'm done before I'd even really get started on the Googlefoo to try a GNOME version. Tk is old and a bit klunky but a solid accurate manual beats the snot out of any theoretical tech advantage in my estimation.

Developers! Developers! Developers!

Posted Aug 26, 2012 19:03 UTC (Sun) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]

The documentation and examples available at pygtk.org weren't bad, when I first dipped my toes into Gtk+ programming in Python a few years ago.

Now, with the switch to PyGObject-Introspection, things are a bit more cloudy. There is a nice Gtk+ 3 in Python tutorial out there, built with Sphinx (the documentation tool, not the search index), but I don't remember the URL.

I've received a patch to convert my PyGtk project to PyGI (I don't think I could've managed to do that myself), and I manage to maintain it, barely, by referring to the C API documentation and translating it into Python syntax. Also, people on IRC are helpful (#pygtk on irc.gnome.org).