Lowering barriers

[Cody Russell <bratsche gnome org>]

On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 18:10 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> Hey, I can be the devil's advocate too: I bet that if Richard had done
> what you are suggesting then we wouldn't have things like g-p-m or
> PackageKit... I bet Richard would just have given up because this free
> software thing has a too steep learning curve. That's true for me
> anyway; I'm also a card-carrying "copy autogunk; hope that it works;
> wait for patches when it breaks" kind of person too.

I've started playing with Rails in my spare time.  I've never done any
web hacking before, for reasons that aren't really relevant here.  But
what is relevant is that Rails makes it really simple and fast to get
started, regardless of whether you're a newbie just wanting to toy
around with it or if you're a professional web hacker who has done half
a dozen Rails apps.

Rails has a command that will auto-generate a skeleton web app for you
just by running "rails <projectname>", and it just works so you can then
begin developing your application incrementally.

It would be really sleek if we came up with a utility that could do this
for Gnome/GTK apps, and I think it would lower the barrier for people to
try to start developing.  If we had something that worked like, say:
   "ghack --python --docs --intl <projectname>"

This could take a language parameter like --csharp or --ruby or
something, some optional parameters like --docs or --intl or whatever
else, and then generate a full working skeleton app or library with a
functioning build system (whatever that may be, auto-fu or waf or
CMake.. it kind of doesn't matter), pkg-config stuff, etc.

We have an svn module called gnome-hello that is a sample C app (I'm not
sure how up-to-date it is now, though).  I think this "ghack" app would
do something like gnome-hello, except that it would generate things for
you so you don't have to manually copy files and rename stuff from
gnome-hello, and it would generate skeletons for all supported
languages, and maybe embed links to documentation on the web in the
comments in the code in order to make it more obvious what to do next.

/ Cody