Contacts

Beside this wiki page, the GnomeLove project also features:

• the gnome-love@gnome.org mailing list

• the #gnome-love irc channel on irc.gnome.org

This page mainly focuses on developers, but there are also many other ways to get involved.

Getting started

Those guides provide useful information on the differents steps a beginner may follow to start contributing, and get to know how the things work.

• Thoughts on how to start your GNOME journey, for those interested in getting involved or just writing GNOME applications (by RyanMcDougall).

  • {en} How to Start Your GNOME journey

  • {pt} Como Começar Sua Jornada no GNOME

  • {ru} Как начать свой путь в GNOME

  • {es} Cómo comenzar tu viaje hacia GNOME

  • {de} Wie Du Deine GNOME-Reise startest

  • {fr} Comment commencer votre périple GNOME

• Thoughts about working on Free Software (by HavocPennington)

• http://planet.gnome.org is a good place to learn about GNOME and its users

Technical guides

Please maintain consistency when adding a new reference to keep this page as clear as possible...

• A Getting Started Guide for those interested in developing with GNOME is being written. It hasn't been updated for a few months, but it currently contains

  • Quick overviews of the important tools you need to use and websites you should be aware of
  • Programming tutorials in c, c++, perl, and python for using glade/libglade and gconf (with gtk+ being learned along the way)
  • Debugging tutorials covering gdb, strace, and valgrind (specifically memcheck)
  • Detailed guide on building GNOME from CVS (use of jhbuild)
  • A "What in the world is that?!?" section to help explain all the cryptic but common tools, libraries, and filenames.

• Overview of the GNOME Platform (by ShaunMcCance)

• A GnomeGlossary of the terms that get bandied around mailing lists

• Capturing Stack Traces: If you are trying to fix a specific bug in GNOME that is a crash, this guide explains how to obtain a stack trace --one of the first important pieces of information needed in most cases to move towards fixing the problem.

• Programming Guidelines: Hints to get used to best practices on programming.

• Submitting Patches: In order to submit improvements you make to various GNOME modules, you will need to make and submit patches. This page explains how to do so (more thoroughly than does the section in the above tutorial on this topic).

• Jhbuild: Jhbuild is a tool designed to build collections of source packages (also known as modules) from a variety of sources. Use this tool to build a copy of the GNOME desktop suitable for development and testing.

Giving love to projects

Case 1: You don't want to work on a specific project

Then the GnomeGoals are made for you. Instead of project-based bug correction, it generally consists of task-based desktop-wide bug corrections. You then learn a single task, but touch to every project, which is a good exercise to get started. The tasks are usually simple and short, and accompanied with guidelines. You also need less commitment in the project, so this is perfect for people wanting to contribute on an irregular basis.

Also, if you're interested in performance issues, look at GnomePerformance for how to help in making GNOME run faster, and, in the same spirit, see MemoryReduction to help in reducing the amount of memory used by GNOME.

Case 2: You don't know which project you want to work on

Look at bugzilla bugs with the gnome-love keyword. These are tasks suitable for new developers, for many GNOME projects.

Case 3: You want to work on a specific project

Then check out the ModuleMaintenanceWorkspaces and pick up a project. Following the associated love-bugs link will lead you to the tasks suitable for GNOME Lovers for that project.

Some projects also have a favorite entry point, or additionnal info for GNOME Lovers:

• GTK+: See the GtkLove bug list and the GtkTasks page for volunteers.

• /GnomeKeyringManager - Project developed only by GNOME lovers. Go there to learn and contribute to it.

• Lockdown Editor - A simple idea in need of developers.

• GStreamer task list

• GnomeApplets

• GnomeGames

• Gedit

• The GNOME System Tools task list.

• Totem: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-love/2004-April/msg00023.html.

• Yelp

• Metacity: The HACKING and code overview files orient you to the code, point out relevant standards, explain a lot of the specialized utilities for testing metacity, show how to debug your code (debuggers don't work well for Metacity), and provide a list of tasks you can work on.

• Epiphany: There are lots of older, sometimes untargeted bugs for Epiphany that the development team doesn't get around to. Help would be most welcome!

• GnomePanel

• Beagle Roadmap/TODO

Other applications:

• Glom (Easy database UIs) has a task list suitable for new contributors.

• Silky - a graphical SILC client - is looking for more developers.

• xchat-gnome has a list of tasks suitable for new developers.

Case 4: You want to work on new projects or new features

There are a bunch of ideas for new projects and features in GNOME, make sure to get the opinion of the affected maintainers or the community because the project in question could have become obsolete, invalid or yet implemented with the passing of time:

• Mentored Projects.

• Ideas and Performance projects from SummerOfCode2006.

• Summer Outreach Projects

• GNOME desktop bounties

GNOME Love Days

The underlying idea behind this, is to have one special day for a given task, for example finding bugs, or improving a specific part of GNOME... On this day, someone will stay on the #gnome-love irc channel to give some support and help you on this task.

Articles and tutorials

Tips & Tricks

• Writing Portable Code

• Best Practices

• Bloopers

• GNOME Recipes

Internationalization

• Internationalization tutorial by Malcolm Tredinnick

• Robust internationalization with GTK+

GUI

• GtkUIManager tutorial for making Menus and Toolbars

• Drag and drop tutorial for your GTK+ applications

• GtkTreeView tutorial by Tim-Philipp Muller

• GtkTextView tutorial by Vijay Kumar

• Panel Applet Tutorial

Other

• GOptions tutorial for easy command line parsing

• Glib Signals with GOB

• Introducing the GMainLoop

• GObject tutorial by Mathieu Lacage

• Integrating existing software with GNOME (installing mime types, thumbnailers, etc..)

• Getting started with GStreamer with Python

Books

• Matthias Warkus wrote a (quite outdated by now) book covering the GNOME 2 desktop environment.
  {en} The Official GNOME 2 Developer's Guide (quite outdated)
  {de} GNOME 2.0: Das Entwickler-Handbuch

• Andrew Krause wrote another book, dedicated to GTK+ 2 development.
  {en} Foundations of GTK+ Development
  

CategoryGnomeLove