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Re: Picking Up Shotwell Development

 

Greetings,

I have just recently joined this list and am eager to help out this community.

I have had a lot of experience with Perl and C in the past, but I have not used them for a while and am very rusty there. I've also toyed around a bit with Mac OS X and iOS development (but have never made any "real" apps).

I currently do web development with WordPress and am quite knowledgeable in PHP.

All that said, this is my first experience with attempting to program on a linux machine. I'm enjoying it immensely so far! I just learned about vala a week ago and am already building a nifty app with it, mostly leaning on examples from around the web. Last night I found out about Glade, downloaded it, and played around with it quite a bit. It's a fun tool.

In any case I went ahead and downloaded the newly created trunk for pantheon-photos. I've already made some changes as requested in the bug tracker. However, as this is my first time developing for elementary and linux in general, I would appreciate any guidance from team members. I searched on the website but could not find references to how to set up a development environment with all the necessary packages.

I would really appreciate if someone could describe how to get up and running, using pantheon-photos as an example. I learn quickly and if someone takes the time to help me get set up for this one app, I believe I can then apply that thruout the rest of elementary (because I would like to contribute a lot more in the future). I have some ideas for an Address Book and making changes to Calendar to allowing syncing.

At the moment, I got as far as making changes to one source code file, SearchFilter.vala (I removed the labels from the toolbar as listed on launchpad), ran configure (it generated an error about pkg-config not being able to locate glibphoto2 even tho it is installed, which I fixed), then ran make. make failed with a whole bunch of errors, almost all related to pkg-config not being able to locate packages (as similar to glibphoto2). For example:
Package gee-0.8 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gee-0.8.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'gee-0.8' found

I can copy the full output of the failed make if anyone is able to help.

Apologies if this is not the proper channel for this request, but I've tried: searching the website and hanging out in elementary-dev and have not had much success with either.

Please help, I'd really like to contribute to the project.

Cheers,
Tristan


On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 1:34 PM, Daniel Foré <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Harvey has some great mocks on dA. I'm going to be trying to ticket some smaller design issues until we get it in a state where I think we can start moving the UI in that direction.

The first big design challenge is going to be sorting through that menubar and making sure all the functionality is available in the UI. Then we can start talking about some bigger UI changes.


On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 12:29 PM, A. "Xylon" V. <avlabs314@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yay! Maybe some blueprints linking to some mockups and how they should be implemented would be helpful?

On Jan 24, 2014 8:13 PM, "Daniel Foré" <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hey Team,

I’ve been talking to Jim Nelson (President of Yorba) about Shotwell for a while now and here’s the quick and dirty: Shotwell needs a new maintainer. Ubuntu has the Gallery app, Fedora has GNOME photos, and Yorba just doesn’t have the resources anymore to maintain Shotwell. Their focus is on Geary. So that pretty much leaves us or an unknown to take up the mantel.

Jim seems really excited about the idea of Shotwell becoming a part of our community. He thinks we have the talent and the vision to bring it up to date and make it into a really great app. But there’s a small caveat: Yorba recently joined the GNOME development community. So officially, development is done in GNOME git and bugzilla and their wiki, etc. Which is obviously not ideal for us.

Enter the solution: After some discussion with Jim, we think the best course of action is for elementary to fork Shotwell. I’ve taken the liberty of setting up a launchpad page for Pantheon Photos. It is currently maintained by elementary-apps team, but I think we’ll want to create a Pantheon Photos team as Jim wants to stay in the loop on development, but we don’t want to spam him with all the other elementary apps stuff.

Firstly, I know that this is a big responsibility to take on. I think as a community, we can do it. Having Photos in launchpad and under the umbrella of the elementary apps team will allow us a lot more freedom for casual involvement with the code base. Not to mention, Jim has already stated that he is available to answer anyone’s questions or give guidance regarding how Shotwell’s code is structured, things to watch out for, etc.

I think this is going to be a really positive move for our photos app and I’m looking forward to working with all of you on building a really great Photos experience in elementary OS.

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Best Regards,

Daniel Foré

elementaryos.org

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Best Regards,

Daniel Foré

elementaryos.org

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