Focus of the introduction for programmers

[Bruno Girin]

On Tue, 2010-02-02 at 19:56 -0300, Brian Vidal Castillo wrote:
> It could sound like a fanboy, but using a powerful IDE is the best 
> choice for programers new to Ubuntu.
> And I think Eclipse is the right for this tasks.

I'd agree to that. Eclipse is very powerful. I've used it extensively
and it's hard to beat. Add to this that it is also cross-platform and is
one of the most common IDE on Windows and Mac and a large number of
developers used to work in those environments feel at home with Eclipse.

> 
> There are plugins for bzr (whic I use).
> But a little more love from the community would help a lot.

Some of the things that would be very useful are standard packages for
the pydev plugin, a bzr plugin and a .deb packaging plugin.

[snip]

> > I agree with what you're saying, although imho if you're serious about
> > becoming an Ubuntu contributor on any type of technical level you'll
> > probably want to learn packaging. You might not want to do sponsorship
> > work or merges or anything MOTU-specific, but knowing how to provide
> > patches and being able to upload your own code and bug fixes seems
> > very useful. I think they should be pointed to packaging in addition
> > to what you propose above, and also other tools that are used across
> > Ubuntu such as bzr.
> >
> > -Jonathan

I agree and I think that's an area that needs work. As an experienced
developer on other platforms, I find packaging to be the biggest
challenge to being able to contribute code because it is Ubuntu (or
rather Debian) specific and I can't relate it easily to what I know.
Learning Python when you know other OO languages is not too difficult,
nor is learning bzr when you know svn; but the wheels come off when it
comes to packaging because producing a .deb feels a lot more complicated
than producing a .jar for a Java application to the uninitiated like me.

Bruno