Natan Yellin gave a lightning talk at the GNOME Summit 2008 about the documentation problems that make it difficult for new people to jump into development. Slides are available below. You can also view them online at Slideshare.
Comments
- This is already wildly out of date. It discusses developer.gnome.org, which was in a state of flux at the time. developer.gnome.org is now mostly dead and doesn't contain much more than a link to the new stuff at library.gnome.org. A critique of library.gnome.org would be very welcome, and should happen regularly. -- Murray Cumming.
- Thanks for letting me know about that. I haven't had much time to follow up on this since the summit but library.gnome.org is definitely an improvement. Mirco Müller recently notified me about discussions at UDS on developer documentation and it was good to hear that there's also been an increased awareness upstream. School is my top priority at the moment, but I hope that I'll have some time to work on this issue in the near future. -- Natan Yellin
One other quick comment: I briefly discussed library.gnome.org in my presentation at the summit but I never had a chance to update my slides accordingly. One of the issues that I mentioned in response to feedback and questions from the audience was that http://library.gnome.org/devel/tools is very much unusable unless you already know what you need. It would be great to see a page like http://developer.apple.com/technology/tools.html with a big "Download" button and more useful descriptions of each tool directly on the page itself. The extra few steps can kill a lot of potential contributors. -- Natan Yellin