Beginner's struggle to make a real gnome application (and be an educated mantainer)

[Enrico Zini <zinie cs unibo it>]

Hello,

I wanted to learn gtk and gnome programming, so I've written a nice and smart
GTK+ application to manage a collection of mp3 cds, make playlists, ask for the
cds to play them, caching frequently listened songs to hard disk, and allowing
for infinite new features like making and printing cd or cassette cover from a
playlist and such. It has already received good feedback from another user.

Next thing on my way is gnomifying it, and it already makes some use of
gnome-app, gnome-app-helper, stock pixmaps, and all niceties offered by
gnomeui.

Then I got into internationalization, I found my way around gettext and started
translations to English, Italian, French and the lovely dialect of Bologna
(Italy), where I live.

Lastly I came to autoconf and I haven't found my way in.  I consulted the
autoconf tutorial linked by the gnome site
(http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/mydocs/autoconf_tutorial_toc.html), but I
still don't know where to start from. I downloaded the sources of
gnome-standalone, but:

enrico@marvin:/tmp$ tar zxvf ~/programmi/gnome/automake/gnome-standalone.tgz
enrico@marvin:/tmp$ cd gnomestandalone-0.01/
enrico@marvin:/tmp/gnomestandalone-0.01$ ./configure
configure: error: can not find sources in . or ..
enrico@marvin:/tmp/gnomestandalone-0.01$ # And now?

The system is a Debian Slink on i386 with the gnome-stage-slink Gnome system.
It compiles my gnome application fine, and gedit 0.5.1 ./configures and
compiles fine.

So much for it, I resorted to the list: I have now this application that links
to gtk, gnome and libmysqlclient (hopefully also postgres support in the
future); it includes a couple of perl files it exec()s to scan CDs; it is
internationalized.

I would like to know:

 1) How do I organize the directory layout of the distribution?

mp3i-<version>/	the package directory (package-version, right?)
 ./		autoconf stuff, README, Changelog, TODO, INSTALL and?
 doc/		still empty (I'll fill it, I swear! :) )
 include/	.h stuff (should go in .c ?)
 macros/	autoconf macros ??
 perl/		perl scripts (where should I put them?)
 po/		i18n stuff
 src/		.c stuff

 2) What files do I need to write, and what do I need to write in them to 
    make autoconf make a Makefile that compiles (makes) my application?

 3) What's the standard syntax for a Changelog? What's The Right Way to mantain
    one?
 
 4) What else do I need to make it a Good Gnome application? What's The Right
    Way of providing an entry in the panel menu for it?
 
 5) What's The Right Way of sharing it? License is GPL and contributions
    will surely be welcome when the source tarball becomes presentable.


Now I :wq and hope for the best.

TYA, Enrico

--
GPG public key available on finger -l zinie@cs.unibo.it