On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 18:10 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote: > Hey, I can be the devil's advocate too: I bet that if Richard had done > what you are suggesting then we wouldn't have things like g-p-m or > PackageKit... I bet Richard would just have given up because this free > software thing has a too steep learning curve. That's true for me > anyway; I'm also a card-carrying "copy autogunk; hope that it works; > wait for patches when it breaks" kind of person too.
I've started playing with Rails in my spare time. I've never done any web hacking before, for reasons that aren't really relevant here. But what is relevant is that Rails makes it really simple and fast to get started, regardless of whether you're a newbie just wanting to toy around with it or if you're a professional web hacker who has done half a dozen Rails apps. Rails has a command that will auto-generate a skeleton web app for you just by running "rails <projectname>", and it just works so you can then begin developing your application incrementally. It would be really sleek if we came up with a utility that could do this for Gnome/GTK apps, and I think it would lower the barrier for people to try to start developing. If we had something that worked like, say: "ghack --python --docs --intl <projectname>" This could take a language parameter like --csharp or --ruby or something, some optional parameters like --docs or --intl or whatever else, and then generate a full working skeleton app or library with a functioning build system (whatever that may be, auto-fu or waf or CMake.. it kind of doesn't matter), pkg-config stuff, etc. We have an svn module called gnome-hello that is a sample C app (I'm not sure how up-to-date it is now, though). I think this "ghack" app would do something like gnome-hello, except that it would generate things for you so you don't have to manually copy files and rename stuff from gnome-hello, and it would generate skeletons for all supported languages, and maybe embed links to documentation on the web in the comments in the code in order to make it more obvious what to do next. / Cody _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
