Re: [Nautilus-list] Newbie Developer Questions

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

begin  Greg Johnson quotation:
> 
> I was playing around with the source last night and ran into some basic
> problems (sorry if these have been addressed before).

Hi Greg, let's seeif I can help any.
 
> - How do I prevent nautilus from "leaving" my console so I can see the
> printf's.. or what's the best way to debug nautilus
 
The main Nautilus process will normally keep displaying on the console
you are running from. However, components you launch in a separate
process (such as the hardware view, which you mention below) normally
will not. You can fix this by making sure oafd is deadl (for instance
run nautilus-clean.sh), and then setting the environment variable
OAF_DEBUG_OUTPUT to "true". Then you should get debugging output even
from components.

You may also want to try debugging with gdb. If you're debugging an
out-of-process component, you can actually fire it up in gdb first,
set your breakpoints, and then launch Nautilus. Nautilus will talk to
the already running process.

> - I am modifying the hardware component is there a way to just recompile
> that component without rebuilding all of nautilus and doing a make
> install.

If you do a `make install' in the components/hardware directory, it
should recompile just that component. I think Jonathan Blandford
<jrb redhat com> is also interested in doing some work to enhance the
hardware view. You may want to talk to him about his plans.

> - Can someone point out some good urls or tutorials as to how bonobo
> works

Bonobo comes with fairly complete API docs; I'm notsure if there is a
good tutorial.
 
> - Is it bad to #include a linux kernel header file? (I assume yes, but
> it looks like the hardware component is rather linux specific anyway)

You need to make sure to detect whether this header is available in
the configure script. You can use the AC_CHECK_HEADER macro in the
configure.in script. Check the autoconf docs for more info.

You should make sure that either the whole component, or at least the
code dependent on this header is not compiled when the header is not
available.

I think it would be nice to try to make the hardware view more
general, not less, but I know that's hard in the world of Unix, where
there aren't nice cross-platform ways to deal with hardware.

> Nautilus Rocks! I hope I can help someday :)

I hope you can get involved too. Besides this mailing list, another
good place to go to get help on Nautilus hacking is the channel
#nautilus on irc.gnome.org. You can typically find at least one
Nautilus developer there at most times.

Hope this helps,

Maciej