Ninkendo dot org
Witty title.
Gnome-Do Development
After continual attempts from Jorge to persuade me to get off my ass and start contributing, I finally decided to help him out and write a Launchpad plugin for gnome-do. He put a spec together on the Ubuntu wiki and I started developing off it.
The whole experience has been delightful. Most of the gnome-do development is aggregated by launchpad (The project page for gnome-do is here), which is what mirrors all the contributed branches, stores all the bug reports, keeps blueprints on file... pretty much everything you need to manage an open source project. It's very well integrated into bzr as well, which is a fine version control system, and project management integration is something missing from my more preferred VCS, git.
That point bears repeating: It's good to have a quality project management site along with distributed version control. I'm beginning to think that it's the best way to do DVC: the whole point of which is for each contributor to have his or her own branch, and pushing and pulling, rather than checking into a master tree, is the way to share code. It seems so obvious, but without a heavyweight repository site like Launchpad, the process of finding other branches and developers is much more difficult, and the very purpose of distributed development is made less effective. If anyone knows of a similar system for git, I'd like to know it. Yes, git.kernel.org has a lot of code branches, but it's nowhere near as simple to find and associate contributors to projects and see at a glance what contributors are doing. And even if gitweb improved, no individual gitweb site has approached the kind of center of gravity of something like launchpad.
Tangent aside, the homepage for my plugin branch is here, and from there you can browse the source and track my commits. Gnome-do is written in C#, and is very enjoyable to write plugins for. I spent a day or so learning the architecture (I could've saved time by reading the wiki page), then it only took a few hours to get the plugin into a working state. It really seems like the author (Dave Siegel) knew what he was doing when development started.
The plugin itself contains a handful of useful shortcuts for launchpad navigation, like finding users, tracking bugs buy number, browsing blueprints, and much more.
Here's an obligatory screenshot:
Development's mostly complete except for any bugs I may find, and barring any feature creep I let slip in. :-P
If you want to test it, go ahead and snag my bzr branch with
and compile, install, run. See the documentation for details. This is just a plugins tree, so you need to have gnome-do installed already to run it.
Posted by Ken on February 29, 2008 8:52 PM
Awesome to hear Ken. It's great to see such cool plugins making it into GNOME Do. It just makes it so much more useful.
Posted by Rick Harding | March 01, 2008 12:20 AM