Re: Frescobaldi 2.0.13 devel first impressions and questions

[Davide Liessi]

Dear Jacques,

Am 21.01.2014 10:40, schrieb Jacques Menu:
> Is Mac OS X a possible OS to download the code and contribute, once
> there’s a running Frescobaldi-dev already installed, or is Linux to be
> preferred?

Development of Frescobaldi is perfectly feasible on Mac OS X, and as
Urs said if you already installed Frescobaldi you basically have
anything you need, except Git and an editor.

You already have MacPorts, so the easiest way to install Git is
sudo port install git-core +bash_completion +svn
The variants aren't necessary, but they are very useful: with
+bash_completion you can complete Git command arguments on the
Terminal with the tab key, like with commands and file names; with
+svn you get also git-svn, which is very useful in case you need to
work with SVN repositories (this is not the case of Frescobaldi, but
you never know).

You need an editor, better if with Python syntax highlighting.
(For what is worth, I use TextWrangler.)

Then for your convenience you can make Python 2.7 provided by MacPorts
the default Python:
sudo port select --set python python27
This way when you enter "python" on the Terminal you will run Python
2.7 provided by MacPorts instead of the one of Mac OS X.

The easiest way to contribute to Frescobaldi is to subscribe to
GitHub, fork the repository https://github.com/wbsoft/frescobaldi and
clone your forked repository on your machine (instructions at
https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo).

Once you have a copy of the repository, you can begin your work on it.
You can start Frescobaldi from within the repository with "python
frescobaldi" (not just "./frescobaldi", because the first line of the
file "frescobaldi" points to "/usr/bin/python", which is the
system-provided Python).
Frescobaldi's settings will be shared between different copies of Frescobaldi.

I don't know how much you know Git, so forgive me if what follows is
unnecessary.
There are a lot of guides and tutorials about Git, e.g. http://git-scm.com/doc.
And of course there are the man pages.
You should get to know what branches are and how they work: when I
work on a (non-trivial) task I usually work in a new branch and merge
the branch back to the master branch when the task is completed (often
after rebasing the branch on master).
This is very useful, because I feel more free to experiment in a
branch, and thanks to the rebasing I keep a saner development history.

Let me know if you need further help.
Best wishes.
Davide