Making GNOME 3.0 attractive for developers
5. March 2010
This post is a spin off from the recent foundation-list discussion regarding the future direction of GNOME. It was pointed out that GNOME might not be a very attractive platform for new developers. The reasons was among others that there is nothing like a standard way of developing GNOME applications. Of course, everybody is somehow using automake and autoconf and some editor and bugzilla but not more than that.
Compared to windows, about any new developer will stumble over Visual Studio. On Mac, it is the same with XCode. For these tools there is tons of documentation, tutorial and books available and they are actively promoted with the platform.
For GNOME 3.0 we should also start having something like this. This doesn’t mean than present developers have to change their development model but they should be aware that their personal model might not be suitable for new developers especially those with no Linux/free software experience. As such, we should promote the tools we have to make life of new developers easier and ensure that they work with the workflow of a specific project.
In a perfect world, I would announce a hackfest here now, but I won’t 
But I would encourage people to help anyway. I have setup a wiki page to collect ideas. The major points are in my opinion:
- Write good tutorials how to build GNOME applications without touching command-line
- Setup a website (maybe on library.gnome.org) hosting all the information for getting started with GNOME development
Everybody is invited to contribute!
GNOME-Track on LinuxTag
1. March 2010
We have been offered the chance to run a GNOME-Track on LinuxTag 2010 (June 9th to 12th) in Berlin. As we would love to do that we still need 2-3 talks. So if you are located in Germany or want to come to LinuxTag and have something interesting to say about GNOME, please either contact Vincent or me so we can add you to the list. For now we only need a title and a short discription of your talk. It’s possible to do talks in german or in english at your option.
We would especially encourage some of the zeitgeist/gnome-activity-journal developers to do a talk as we know that some of them live in Germany.
The deadline for submission is today! Don’t blame me for that, we really would have liked to get this out earlier…
Let’s make this a rocking event for promoting GNOME!