I basically never made it past step one. I was using jhbuild (which I loved) to build GNOME from CVS, but I found to my dismay that GNOME in its entirety is almost never buildable (or wasn’t at the time). I didn’t just try a few times. I tried at least a couple of times a week over the course of a couple of months. Not once was I able to just start up jhbuild, leave for a while, and come back with a successful build. I was generally able to fix things and continue the build if I spent enough time on it, and I got CVS builds of GNOME running on several occasions, but it would literally take me all day just to do that (usually it was autoconf erroring out for one reason or another rather than a compilation failure). Ultimately I decided that I was spending all of my time on just trying to build GNOME and no time actually working on it, so I gave up and moved on to more rewarding projects.

I’ve seen mention of somebody (Luis Villa?) setting up a tinderbox machine since then, but I have no idea what the state of that is. And maybe things have changed since a couple of years ago. But I was surprised that CVS HEAD was broken as often as it was.

Just compiling a *released* version is pretty difficult without a few hacks… never managed to have a running platform with a single “jhbuild build”. So imagine when compaling an unstable version and that someone breaks the cvs… you just don’t know why, and just have to wait a few days, or know a date when it worked and have some cvs knowledge.

The other important problem of the GNOME platform is the documentation. Outdated information available at developer.gnome.og harms more that does good. Theres no centralized repository for tutorials, and many tutorials available are in html, so it’s not easy to update them when they become outdated, unlike their wikified counterparts.

For the simple question “how should I create a menu in a gtk app”, information on developer.gnome.org would talk me of bonobo, while live.gnome.org would send me to GtkUIManager… Kinda hard to know what is the right way to do something.

We really need a centralized (and wikified, I think) version of all the “moving” documentation (code, cvs, jhbuild, etc… tutorials) and AVOID INFORMATION DUPLICATION !!!

The sheer volume of C code required to do anything trivial really pushed me away. I can read and write C well enough, but I prefer to avoid it, as I’ve discovered C’s somewhere between ASM and Java. When I’m trying to learn an architecture, a concept, pages of C code get in the way of a six word idea.

I still find it easier to write wxPython than GNOME code. The wxPython demo and documentation go hand-in-hand, and it’s terribly simple to do almost anything. I didn’t find anything comparable for Gnome. The best stuff is in the mono Gtk stuff.

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