[Discuss-gnustep] Newbie contributors & some ?'s

[rpb]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, Nicola Pero wrote: 

> But I don't like the word `newbie`

with the speculation on how to get contributers, or more specifically
newbie contributers, I thought I'd pipe up, and comment on a some of this.
I'm a newbie (I don't mind the term, although I can see where you're
coming from. I figure it might increase my chances of getting that help
and advice you talked about) and would like to be a
contributer. Not objective-c nor openstep experience prior to this. 
 
> In my concrete experience - there is a certain point in the `career' of a
> free software hobbist/developer in which he/she wants to stop contributing
> to other people's projects and start his/her own project.  He wants to get
> out of the mass - he wants something important with his/her name on it :-) 
> People in this situation will find a very hard competition and very few
> space in GNOME or KDE.  We can offer them instead a great deal of
> possibilities, a great deal of projects to be started from the ground up. 


> I personally enjoy what I can see of GSMail.app and GNUMail.app.
> But - I can't use them, and development seems to be stopped.
> So - if anyone - anybody - wants to come and start a new mail app, 
> that would be great.  He/she can freely borrow from the existing code 
> in GSMail and GNUMail (it's all GNU GPL as far as I know) and organize 
> its own project. 

As for working on an already started project, or starting a new one. I
don't think it has a lot to do with getting a name on something. I
found it easier to learn by starting from scratch, and borrowing ideas and
methadology from the already started apps. GSMail being helpful for its
examples of NSMatrix, NSUserdefaults, and some others. It's easier to get
a handle on how things work, and fix it when it doesn't, if you have the
code isolated in your small simple app (in my case, Mines.app, a
minesweeper clone). It might be important to note I still have nothing
substantial to show for my efforts, but I think I've learned a bit anyways  

I have tried to work some on GSMail, and mainly ran into a question and
a problem. first the question: I noticed that in the GNUmakefile it was a
.gswa instead of a .app   didn't really know what a .gswa was and
couldn't find an explanation anywhere, so I changed it all to a .app.
should it not be that way? and the Problem: trying to open any window
besides the reader window, which opens automatically, caused a segfault. I
tracked down the problem to an instance of NSFont. (for eg [font
boundingRectForFont].size.height+5) replacing those sorts of things with a
number, 20 in this case, fixed it. although not a very good fix, I
don't think. I'm using linuxppc and xgps. would either of those things
have anything to do with it?

In either case (starting or continuing a project) GNUstep has been fairly
difficult for me to delve into for lack of documentation. Nicola's
Tutorials are very helpful to a point, and the apple documentation is
good, if a bit sparse in places (the NSBrowser delegate methods come to
mind), but besides that the best I've found is source code.

just my .02

Rob