elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

["Sergey \"Shnatsel\" Davidoff" <sergey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Guys, it's been two days and a flamewar, and still no constructive
pointers?! You should feel ashamed for yourself!

Hi Tobia! I hope this initial accidental flamewar wasn't too off-putting.
We really should set up better exchange of patches between Shotwell and
Photos one of these days, and work in the spirit of collaboration instead
of... well, THAT.

First thing you'd need is to familiarize yourself with Vala. Here are some
links to get you started:
https://live.gnome.org/Vala/Tutorial - the official tutorial, which is
rather comprehensive
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala/ValaForJavaProgrammers and
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala/ValaForCSharpProgrammers might be
handy if you're familiar with either Java or C#, since Vala resembles those
languages (C# in particular)
http://valadoc.org/ hosts documentation on most libraries,
http://valadoc.elementaryos.org/ for documentation on elementary's in-house
convenience library (only used in Photos). Sometimes we ship package
versions different from those documented on valadoc.org; if in doubt, check
/usr/share/vala/vapi/ locally for the definitive bindings.

http://elementaryos.org/docs/code is a kickstart for Vala and contributing
to elementary projects, and to some extent the GTK box model. I believe our
guide still doesn't cover submitting patches, so refer to the old dev guide
draft
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FHF4gXZfBZuOvDBuFPtJuCcaCyjSi-fpZ_-kWj6N4FA/edit#heading=h.o9ppeoo2c0qd>
for that instead. If you have any problems with understanding GTK, GNOME
developer screencasts <http://vimeo.com/25185245> can be of use, or just
ask around.

#elementary-dev on FreeNode is our development IRC channel, but it's not
really populated by developers these days - we now use a more convenient
but proprietary platform internally that (unfortunately) does not allow
guest access. (Somebody please send an invite to our Slack to this guy!).

For Photos, the project page is at https://launchpad.net/pantheon-photos
(see elementary developer guide for handling those), and you should also
check out elementary Human Interface Guidelines at
http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines if you're
interested in contributing. Photos is largely about making Shotwell get out
of your way and redesigning to so it can live up to elementary OS usability
standards. Looking at the bug tracker, there's still quite some low-hanging
fruit in the UI. This should be a good starting point since you'd learn
GTK, Vala and talking to designers all at once :)

I can't comment on contributing to Shotwell besides linking to
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell since I don't typically deal with it.
Perhaps Jim will be willing to give some pointers.

May the Source be with you!
-- 
Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff