Re: Gnome development thinking!



Hi Henrik,

On Mon, 2003-09-01 at 12:09, Henrik Brink wrote:
> Why is the development-process so (relatively) hard to join? I shouldn't
> contact you to say that I want to help out. It should be an obvious
> thing!

	:-) I think a good driver for development is solving problems you
personally have an interest in - that should lead you to one particular
project eg. D/BUS or OpenOffice.org - and you contact people, read the
code and get stuck in.

> Imagine a GUI application. This program allows you to join development
> groups (workgroups) in which you are skilled, and presents some possible
> tasks. If you take the task, it disapears from the list, and when you
> are finished it shows up again for the other people in your workgroup to
> comment on your work.

	There are serious scalability problems with distributed lock
management; particularly - some people are all talk and no action, and
this type of person may be relied upon to take as many exciting sounding
tasks as possible - and never finish them ;-) Ultimately, there are
enough real problems out there in need of fixes that the likelihood of
duplication of effort seems fairly low [1].

	Of course - if you want to start bold new endeavours, make visionary
brush sweeps of code etc. then you're going to conflict with loads of
people ;-) so don't. Just join an existing project and make small
iterative improvements, then you'll soon be able to see where the action
is, what is needed and take on bigger projects.

	That at least, is my experience ;-) oh, and if you want a task - I
happen to know that a gtk+ frontend for the x3270 IBM terminal program 
would be rather good news for Gnome; you'd learn a lot about gtk+ I
guess, but then it's better to hack with other people - at least at
first.

	HTH,

		Michael.

[1] - see http://www.gnome.org/~michael/todo.html for a longish list of
things that never get done; indeed, you could have been working on
almost any-one of these for a year and not had a conflict ;-)
-- 
 michael ximian com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot




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