GNOME Foundation

Tag: gtk

  • GNOME Season of Docs 2020

    GNOME is applying to be a participating organization in the Google Season of Docs 2020

    About GNOME

    GNOME is a worlwide community that creates a desktop environment, applications, and the underlying technology. GNOME has a long history of design-oriented development, and of working on all parts of the stack to create a good user experience. The GNOME documentation team has worked on both user and developer documentation for over two decades, and was one of the pioneers in creating modular, topic-oriented help.

    The GNOME community is loosely organized, with different people teams working on different parts of the project. We strongly value all kinds of contributions, including design, documentation, translations, and outreach. GNOME is more than code.

    GNOME has a long history of working with mentoring and outreach programs, including the GNOME Newcomers initiative, Google Summer of Code, and Outreachy (which was incubated in GNOME as the Outreach Program for Women).

    Please read our code of conduct.

    Get in touch

    Mentors for the Season of Docs are:

    • Petr Kovar <pmkovar AT gnome DOT org>
    • Shaun McCance <shaunm AT gnome DOT org>
    • Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi AT gmail DOT com> (developer docs)

    But you are encouraged to talk to the entire team and the wider community:

    Information for technical writers

    Before you begin, we encourage you to reach out to the team and introduce yourself. We strive to be a welcoming community, but we also value seeing initiative from contributors. You will work with a number of technologies and systems. Some might be familiar to you. Some might not. If you would like to start learning on your own first, that’s great, but we are prepared to teach you what you need to know. Here’s a (probably incomplete) list of what you might learn, depending on project:

    • Mallard, a modular, topic-oriented documentation language and framework.
    • The git version control system. git can be intimidating, but it is used by most open source projects these days, and it enables some powerful workflows.
    • The merge request workflow on GitLab, similar to the pull request workflow on GitHub.

    In addition to your project, we would appreciate if you keep a log of things you find difficult when learning to contribute. This will help us improve the onboarding process in the future.

    Project ideas

    Below are three ideas for projects.

    1. GTK documentation

    Summary: Review and update the structure and content of the GTK API reference.

    Description: The GTK API reference is made of two parts: one is the description of each function and type in the API; the other is more “narrative”, and contains a general description of each class; overview of complex, interdependent classes (e.g. GtkTreeView, GtkTreeModel, GtkCellArea; or GtkTextView and GtkTextBuffer); a short tutorial on how to write an application using GTK. This second part is the one in need of review and update. The tone and structure of the documentation should be consolidated, and made more appropriate for newcomers to the library.

    2. GObject tutorial consolidation

    Summary: Review and update the content of the GObject tutorial and overview

    Description: The GLib object type system documentation contains an overview of the type system and of the base object class, with topics ranging from the lifetime of an object instance, to how to install properties; from interfaces to best practices on how to write object types; and a tutorial, which covers similar topics in a more narrative way. Ideally, we should only have a tutorial covering all topics, and have specialised, in-depth documentation for the more complex aspects of the API. The base concepts section should be merged with the tutorial section by having the former section use examples and a more narrative voice from the latter.

    3. Content audit and gap analysis for gnome-help

    Review all of topics in gnome-help (part of the gnome-user-docs documentation module). Identify information that is out of date or misleading. Review recent changes to GNOME to find areas where gnome-help is missing information. After the audit and gap analysis, there should be time for significant writing, but we don’t expect the technical writer to close all issues identified.

    Revisit which information is presented to readers of gnome-help, and how it is presented. Identify what information people need the most and formulate a content strategy.

    4. Update app help

    Review and update the help for a number of GNOME applications as tracked in https://wiki.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Tasks/ApplicationHelp.

    SeasonofDocs_Logo_MainGrey_300ppi.png

  • GTK+/MeeGo Handset integration work, call for bids

    The GNOME Foundation is looking for developers to enhance the developer experience of using GTK+ to port and create applications on MeeGo Handset devices.

    Knowledge of the MeeGo Handset development process, and GTK+ internals will be required to carry out the work.

    The tasks to be achieved are:

    • Ensure that GTK+ applications display as expected on the MeeGo Handset platform, including checking that fixes to the compositor are made if necessary.
    • Add to upstream GTK+ helper functionality to create stand-alone GTK+ applications to run on MeeGo.
    • Merge Hildon widgets functionality into GTK+ upstream, where it makes sense to do so.

    The money available for the project is $50,000, and the bidder selection will be made by a group including professional consultants with GTK+ and MeeGo experience and GNOME Foundation Board members.

    Bids should include:

    • Results of testing stock GTK+ applications on the MeeGo Handset platform
    • Details of your research into what GTK+ functionality needs to be added to ease porting of stock applications to MeeGo Handset.
    • The list of widgets and functionality ported from Hildon to upstream GTK+, including a review of how the functionality would be integrated (extending existing widgets, new widgets, etc.)
    • A time line and schedule for the whole project
    • References to previous MeeGo, MeeGo Handset, Maemo, or GTK+ work.

    Note that the goal of the GNOME Foundation for this project is upstream acceptance of the various modifications made during the project.

    Please send your proposals to board-list@gnome.org with the subject line “MeeGo Handset Bid”.

This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0.