Compatibility between Ubuntu and GNOME developer strategies

[Rick Spencer]

On Thu, 2010-12-16 at 17:22 +0000, Phil Bull wrote:
> Hi Rick,
> 
> On Thu, 2010-12-16 at 07:55 -0800, Rick Spencer wrote:
> [...]
> > 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.
> 
> This sounds great. Do you know if anyone has been working on Quickly
> support for other distros? If not, how much work do you think it would
> take to get it working on, say, Fedora?
I think it's packaged for Fedora, but I don't think the distro specific
parts have been tweaked.

> 
> Also, does Quickly make strong assumptions about the development
> environment (i.e. PyGTK), or would it be easy to extend to other
> languages (JavaScript, for instance)?
Quickly makes both strong assumptions, and also no assumptions. A
template is a combination of boiler plate code and commands to run on
that code. 

So we have a template called ubuntu-application. It uses PyGtk and a
bunch of other technologies. And then you start a project by running:

$quickly create ubuntu-application my-project-name

The idea is that you can easily replace the "ubuntu-application" part
with whatever you want. For example, you could fork the
ubuntu-application template to make fedora-application. You could change
the preferences to use something other than desktopcouch for
persistence, and change the package command to create an rpm instead of
deb.

You could also create all new template that uses javascript for the
boiler plate code.

Quickly actually has 3 "official" templates right now (application, cli,
and pygame). All of these happen to use Python, but there is no inherent
limitation there. 

> 
> [...]
> > 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.
> 
> I hadn't heard about this - who's working on it? It seems to me that
> there could be a great deal of overlap with the stuff that's happening
> in GNOME at the moment. It might be more fruitful to work together on
> just the one set of documentation, but that does rather depend on what
> the aim and content of the Ubuntu developers manual is.
Indeed, there does seem to be a lot of overlap, and a flow of effort
between the projects seems quite sensible and desirable.

The intent of the manual is that it is a short concise guide that
provides one path to success with developing on Ubuntu. It may not shock
you to hear that Quickly, PyGtk, and Launchpad all factor into it
heavily ;)

We coordinate through the launchpad team and mailing list:
https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-developer-manual

There's some content in the project tree too.

It's an open team, so I hope people feel more than welcome to join and
discuss. We also tend to hang out in #quickly on freenode when we are
discussing.

Cheers, Rick