Developer Story

This page is from discussion at Boston2012

Questions Raised During Summit

• Is CSS part of the developer ABI?
• Should Gtk focus on simple widgets with clear purpose or complex widgets?
• Should a treeview in a button even be possible? (Does disallowing complex widget embedding in a button make anything easier, such as a11y?)
• Why are there so few contributors to Gtk+.
  • A huge body of knowledge is required to contribute to Gtk.
• How do we perform rich animations on all widgets.
• How do we get people to be able to find a bug and fix it.
• If we can expand our consumers, we will have a larger developer base to choose from.
• Who is our toolkit for? ISVs, GNOME itself?
• Is the jhbuild process too much? Too difficult?
• Is the binary output from jhbuild enough?
• What is our ABI story?
• Do we want to expose private APIs to internal applications?
• Do certain audiences prefer certain languages?

What are our potential audiences?

• Independent Software Vendors
• Phone app store style applications (simple, but focused features).
• Games
• Company internal applications (3d design houses write their own)
• Traditional Linux Developer (GNOME Developers)

Are we the most important first target?

It seems that we should focus on enabling ourselves first, since we have first hand knowledge of our own problems.

Things we know about us

• We don't care about API stability because we can ship a collection of applications at once.
• We have access to experts very quickly when there are problems (IRC, IM, email, coworkers, etc)
• We need to make it easier to get a new project up and running.
  • Lots of complaints about automake
  • Make it easier to build a "GNOME OS" styled application. (new-style toolbar, etc)