GNOME Project Handbook Launches To Help New Contributors

[skeevy420]

It may feel harsh, haughty etc, but it's based on a common misunderstanding. Open source means that YOU have the right to patch it, not that you should necessarily expect upstream developers to accept your patches, or to change their vision. Open source is not the same thing as community developement. The huge majority of open source projects in the world are cathedral projects, not bazaar projects, and GNOME is a quintessential cathedral project. It absolutely is "their" desktop, all the more because 99% of those who use it don't pay a cent for it. The upstream developers don't owe it to anyone to merge their patches or even to be open to any patches at all, except to the people who actually employ and pay them.

Disclaimer: I'm not a GNOME developer and have no stake in it. I'm also not making any judgement as to whether it's better or worse that way, just stating how it is.

Sadly, that explains a lot of things.

[browseria]

...you can get books on gnome/GTK2 but there is no book about GTK3 or GTK4 ...
i am not going to read 1600 pages like my CompTIA A+ book in a .PDF file.
...

I agree with you on your "real paper books sentiment". Unfortunately, on fast-moving technologies, especially ones that are more niche, sometimes a PDF is the best you can hope for. A kindle really helps if you want a more traditional experience, you can load any ebook into it.

Did you know about this: GUI development with Rust and GTK 4? It's pretty good with the basics, but it is geared toward someone already familiar with both rust and GTK development already. If you are a novice, I would start with some of the simpler books on rust/gtk maybe based on C, get familiar with the workflow and tools and then work your way over to rust.

Flatpak is simply a ostree container with a certain manifest in it. So anything you know about containers/ostree is directly applicable. Just build your application as normal, stick in the manifest as documented here, and then create the container with flatpak-builder (or your container tool of choice). There really isn't that much more to it (bubblewrap), which is why the documentation on it is pretty sparse - most tools (GNOME Builder, VSCode, etc.) have picked up handling this for you so even this level of knowledge isn't necessary.

There is a lot of change going on right now, just about anything written down and published on paper is obsolete. But the foundations of Rust and GTK development really haven't changed that much, only the particulars, I find the best resources for finding these particulars are simply the GTK Development blog and the Rust blog.

[xAlt7x]

"issue management"

You mean
- added tag not-a-bug
- issue closed as not planned

It's not a "GNOME only" thing but rather depends on a particular developer communication skills.

[tebruno99]

I think there is a typo on page 1. It doesn’t say “don’t bother contributing, thats a feature not a bug and we are leet”

[hf_139]

The best helpful advice for new developers/contributors is: Don't waste your time on deprecated GNOME.

Imagine putting time and effort into a patch for a GNOME project for free, just for it to never get merged, because RedHat employees choose to ignore you.

[hf_139]

It may feel harsh, haughty etc, but it's based on a common misunderstanding. Open source means that YOU have the right to patch it, not that you should necessarily expect upstream developers to accept your patches, or to change their vision. Open source is not the same thing as community developement. The huge majority of open source projects in the world are cathedral projects, not bazaar projects, and GNOME is a quintessential cathedral project. It absolutely is "their" desktop, all the more because 99% of those who use it don't pay a cent for it. The upstream developers don't owe it to anyone to merge their patches or even to be open to any patches at all, except to the people who actually employ and pay them.

Disclaimer: I'm not a GNOME developer and have no stake in it. I'm also not making any judgement as to whether it's better or worse that way, just stating how it is.

But GNOME roleplays as if they would be a community run project. Which inevitably leads to people wasting their time, because they think that they would be welcome as contributors, while they are actually not.

If they would be honest about it, it would be far less of an issue.
In example: SQLite openly states that it is "Open Source but not Open Contribution" and doesn't even offer a simple way to submit patches. I never saw anyone complain about that.

Just don't lie to people.

[intelfx]

Don't waste your time on deprecated GNOME.

Oh, I must have missed the memo. Who deprecated GNOME?

[intelfx]

But GNOME roleplays as if they would be a community run project. Which inevitably leads to people wasting their time, because they think that they would be welcome as contributors, while they are actually not.

If they would be honest about it, it would be far less of an issue.
In example: SQLite openly states that it is "Open Source but not Open Contribution" and doesn't even offer a simple way to submit patches. I never saw anyone complain about that.

Just don't lie to people.

Hm, not sure what’s this all about. My patches were accepted, I was quite welcome as a contributor. Nobody lied to me.

Maybe the problem is not GNOME?

[Mateus Felipe]

I can't blame any windows user trying out gnome and turning away afterwards...

Why would they? I remember back in 2012, when I decided to try Linux for the first time. The first distro I installed was Arch Linux. I tried different DEs and they all felt unpolished, except for GNOME (I think it was 3.2 or 3.4, don't remember well). When I tried GNOME for the first time I fell in love and never wanted to go back to Windows.