Compatibility between Ubuntu and GNOME developer strategies

[Rick Spencer]

On Fri, 2010-12-10 at 17:18 +0000, Phil Bull wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> I attended the "GNOME Developer Documentation and Tools" hackfest in
> Berlin last week. The aim of the hackfest was to work on improving
> resources for developers who use (or want to use) the GNOME platform. A
> number of interesting issues were discussed and we made good progress
> addressing some them (see [1][2][3] for summaries). I'd like to make
> sure that Ubuntu derives full benefit from this work, and to encourage
> people to come and work upstream on some of it.
> 
> DEVELOPER STORY
> 
> What is Ubuntu's "story" for new developers? That is, how are new
> developers, of different "types", introduced to the platform? Is it
> based on Quickly? I feel that it would be advantageous to match the
> Ubuntu and GNOME stories to as great an extent as possible. That way,
> "developers for the GNOME platform" are also "developers for the Ubuntu
> platform" and vice versa.
Quickly is *a* story for new developers, but the intent is certainly not
to limit choice.

Quickly apps are gnome apps in that they use pygtk, and all gnome tools
for UI. However, the layout of an app, and some of the recommended
platform technology choices may vary by distro.

> 
> We developed the GNOME story a little at the hackfest. It's based on
> five key GNOME languages (C, C++, JS, Python, Vala), and we intend to
> emphasise different languages for different types of developer. The hook
> into the platform is a set of exciting, focused tutorials (see below).
> We'll also provide a "blessed" (but not exclusive) development
> environment, which will probably centre around the Anjuta IDE for coding
> and (possibly) the OpenSuSE build service for deployment. It shouldn't
> be difficult to provide this environment in Ubuntu.
This sounds like a great thing. Recommended paths to success make
developer adoption much easier.

> 
> DEPLOYMENT
> 
> Deployment is something that GNOME hasn't really tackled before, but
> it's an important part of the story. At the moment, I think it's fair to
> say that deployment on desktop Linux is an issue for new developers.
> Packaging can be difficult and confusing, and distribution channels
> aren't always easy to tap into. Ubuntu has been trying to address this
> with initiatives like Quickly and the Software Centre app store. My
> question here is, how can we get this sort of thing working upstream so
> everyone benefits? (A Quickly plugin for Anjuta was discussed, for
> example.)
Quickly uses abstract commands like "package", "release", etc...
specifically so that those commands can be implemented per distribution.
So the user could surf across distros, and use the same command set, but
get distro specific behaviors. For example, on some distros "package"
would produce a .deb, and on some distros an .rpm. I would be delighted
to see Quickly templates for other distros.

Quickly has an API, so it should be easy to integrate it with Anjuta or
any other IDE. That combined with distro specific Quickly templates
could provide a consistent developer experience across distros.

> 
> DOCUMENTATION
> 
> There have been some nice improvements to library.gnome.org and we're
> also planning to relaunch the developer.gnome.org portal. This will
> feature a new, up-to-date platform overview, good conceptual overviews
> of key frameworks/libraries like GStreamer, and a number of quick
> tutorials designed to get new developers to "dive in" to GTK/GNOME
> development. There's lots more work to be done on these, but the first
> batch is looking good. Ideas/development would be especially welcome in
> this area - we really need contributors.
The Ubuntu community is working on a project called the Ubuntu
Developers Manual. This will, of course, be licenses so that it can be a
shared resource across distros and also be enhanced to have distro
specific tweaks.

> 
> This initiative is still in its infancy but I think that with a bit of
> work we can make GNOME (and Ubuntu) an extremely compelling development
> platform. I should also emphasise that upstream are very receptive to
> input and are extremely keen to cooperate.
I think there is a lot of opportunity for collaboration here, as well.
I'm looking forward to it.

Cheers, Rick