[packagekit] Introduction

[Richard Hughes]

On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 08:58 -0500, Juan Camilo Prada wrote:
> Also i would like to know how to start... or what should i do so i can
> help. So please tell me, im really willing to learn and help

Sounds great!

Okay, it's difficult to assign work as we don't really know what you are
good at or subjects you want to learn. The harder stuff in TODO is
probably a bit confusing right now, but I'll list some stuff that might
help you get familiar with PackageKit before you help tackle the stuff
that's more complex:

* Lots of the functions are not well commented with gtk-doc. Most
important is to get the libpackagekit/*.c annotated as it's used in
other projects. This is probably quite a boring job but is a good way to
work out how PackageKit is put together.

* We also need to connect up gtk-doc so it produces nice html pages of
the client library (and maybe the daemon internals) which will be useful
for new developers to the project and also for those using
libpackagekit. This is for someone comfortable with Makefiles and
auto-foo plumbing.

* We need to make sure the html documentation is still correct and easy
to read - does any of it sound like technobabble? Is it easy enough for
developers to get detailed information about how to contribute?

* We need to audit all the strings in gnome-packagekit so that they are
easily localisable and don't contain markup. This is one for you if you
are also a translator.

* We need some yelp documentation for the gnome-packagekit tools. This
will mean getting screenshots and generally explaining how to use the
tools.

* We need a proper security audit of the packagekitd daemon. We are
running as root, so we need to make sure we are not doing anything
insane that would mean we could crash and do bad things.

* We need more unit tests where we can actually simulate _using_
packagekit, probably using an enhanced dummy backend and libpackagekit.
This is a tricky one as we can't assume we have the
org.freedesktop.PackageKit.conf file installed in the system prefix -
maybe we can #ifdef the daemon to run in the session bus for some
testing.

* The gnome-packagekit tools don't exactly conform the the GNOME Human
Interface Guidelines (HIG). Someone needs to evaluate the GUI tools and
suggest changing some control types, adding key-shortcuts and tooltips
and changing the spacing between widgets where needed.

* It needs to be clear on the homepage that we are a welcoming bunch of
people, and that we hand out commit access very easily if you want to
jump in and contribute. I'm not sure how clear the git
packagekit.org->freedesktop.org staggered system is, but maybe it needs
further explaining also.

* Maybe we need to have on the website who is responsible for what, i.e.
that Ken and Elliot are the conary dudes, and Luke and Tim are the yum
dudes, etc. Maybe photos and a short two sentence profile might be a
good idea too.

* Somebody needs to put the above list in TODO!

If anybody else wants to grab one of these just mail the list so we
don't have duplication of effort. Good luck!

Richard.

p.s. I'm really leaving now.