Contributing to Pimlico

[Jonathan Lange]

Hello,

I'd like to do a bit of tinkering with Pimlico. I *said* I was going
to do it when I met Rob Bradford at LCA 2008 in Melbourne, but as yet
I haven't got around to it. Sorry. My particular interest is in making
a GTK+ desktop calendar that is a joy to use.

Anyway, one thing I remember from our conversations was that there had
been some significant work going on in branches and that a lot of code
had been re-organised. The word 'jana' was mentioned. Apart from that,
memory fades.

What I'd like to know is,
- What do I need to get in order start productively running and
hacking on dates and other pimlico projects?
- Are there any docs I ought to read?
- Are there any big, work-in-progress refactorings that I should be aware of?
- Where do I submit patches?


Thanks,
jml

[Chris Lord]

Hi John,

Post by Jonathan Lange
I'd like to do a bit of tinkering with Pimlico. I *said* I was going
to do it when I met Rob Bradford at LCA 2008 in Melbourne, but as yet
I haven't got around to it. Sorry. My particular interest is in making
a GTK+ desktop calendar that is a joy to use.
Anyway, one thing I remember from our conversations was that there had
been some significant work going on in branches and that a lot of code
had been re-organised. The word 'jana' was mentioned. Apart from that,
memory fades.
What I'd like to know is,
- What do I need to get in order start productively running and
hacking on dates and other pimlico projects?
- Are there any docs I ought to read?
- Are there any big, work-in-progress refactorings that I should be aware of?
- Where do I submit patches?

Excellent, sounds good :) Work has gone into separating the back-end of
Dates with the front-end - the back-end now exists in its own repository
( http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/jana/trunk ) and is called 'jana'. This
includes an abstraction of general time-related PIM functionality
(journal, calendar and todo (which is, ironically, still a TODO)) and an
ECal implementation of this interface.

Several openmoko applications use libjana, most importantly,
openmoko-dates2
( http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/dates/branches/openmoko2 ). If you're
interested in building openmoko-dates2, it also requires libmokoui2
( http://svn.openmoko.org/trunk/src/target/OM-2007.2/libraries/libmokoui2/ ). Its been on the cards for a while to write a desktop/tablet-focused port of openmoko-dates2, but no one has found the time yet.

jana and jana-ecal are both fully documented, jana-gtk's documentation
is a bit spotty, but there are several examples of its use in the jana
repo, as well as in the various openmoko applications.

I'd say the best way to start a port of dates would be to take the
openmoko2 code-base and factor out the libmokoui2 use first, then think
about molding the UI to better correspond to the previous dates. Patches
can be submitted to http://bugzilla.o-hand.com/ .

Best of luck, keep us informed on how things are going :)

--Chris

[Rob Bradford]

Post by Jonathan Lange
Hello,

Howdy,

Post by Jonathan Lange
I'd like to do a bit of tinkering with Pimlico. I *said* I was going
to do it when I met Rob Bradford at LCA 2008 in Melbourne, but as yet
I haven't got around to it. Sorry. My particular interest is in making
a GTK+ desktop calendar that is a joy to use.
Anyway, one thing I remember from our conversations was that there had
been some significant work going on in branches and that a lot of code
had been re-organised. The word 'jana' was mentioned. Apart from that,
memory fades.

http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/jana/trunk

Post by Jonathan Lange
What I'd like to know is,
- What do I need to get in order start productively running and
hacking on dates and other pimlico projects?

For Tasks:

http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/tasks/trunk

Although I think it's pretty close to being pretty feature
complete...Ross, anything you think's missing?

For Contacts:

There is a rewrite in progress:

http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/contacts/branches/hito/

The hildon version of this is what is being used for UME/Moblin.
OpenMoko also uses this branch. The key thing missing is a decent
generic editor component.

Post by Jonathan Lange
- Are there any docs I ought to read?

Not really, devhelp API reference is all you need. The strategy that you
can see with Tasks, Jana and Hito Contacts is the separation of work
into lots of separate components with those useful standalone components
split into a library. The idea being it should be very easy to port to
different platforms, re "#ifdef hell" from my talk at LCA.

Post by Jonathan Lange
- Are there any big, work-in-progress refactorings that I should be aware of?
- Where do I submit patches?

Ross just created a jana component for Dates on bugzilla.o-hand.com so
that's where Dates patches should go. Tasks and Contacts also have
products there too.

Welcome aboard!

Regards,

Rob

[Ross Burton]

Post by Rob Bradford
http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/tasks/trunk
Although I think it's pretty close to being pretty feature
complete...Ross, anything you think's missing?

Tasks is perfect. Well, almost. :) I don't have any grand plans to
rewrite it just yet, unlike Dates and Contacts.

Ross

[Jeff]

Post by Jonathan Lange
My particular interest is in making
a GTK+ desktop calendar that is a joy to use.

You are so my hero. Go help Chris, now! :)
I'm looking very much forward to all the new jana goodness to come back
into the desktop (gnome) version! I've been dying to get bug #126 (and a
few others such as 259, 737, 768) fixed!