[packagekit] Introduction

[Richard Hughes]

On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 07:10 +0200, Mario wrote:
> On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 1:45 AM, Patrick Klingemann
> <patrick.klingemann at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Greetings,

Greeting also!

> I'm new to Open Source
> > development, but I'm experienced with Open Source Software and I am an
> > experienced developer.

Cool, that sounds like me a few years ago - I came from a VC++ windows
background, and then started used Linux, then tinkered with developing. 

What a journey!

>   My purpose will be to learn, to stay out of the way
> > of the maintainers and core developers and hopefully to contribute something
> > of value.

Well, the best way to do that is jump in! Seriously -- take a task and
then keep asking questions. Keep submitting patches too - even if's it's
just spelling and grammar fixes for now - you'll be up and running and
hacking like the others in no time.

> > Richard mentioned that he plans to integrate PackageKit with Seahorse and
> > after doing some research, this looks like a very interesting area in which
> > to contribute, however, I am open to suggestions and direction.
> Do come to #packagekit, so we can talk. We are more then glad to provide
> useful hints and guide you as you venture into PK codebase.

Yes, the GPG stuff is interesting. Ideally all the GPG keys will be
signed by default, but we'll still need to see the UI for stuff like
Livna. If we can have a web of trust (where the Fedora key "trusts" the
livna key) -- we can make the UI a little less scary. Note -- I'm not
saying that fedora is telling the user "hey, go use livna" but we're
saying we know the key ID - and we verify that who it is. This way we
show a scary warning for acme.repo, but not well known repos.

> > I was able to pull down the source from the git repository and I'm hoping
> > for a little direction to get started tinkering.  What tools are most
> > commonly used for development of PackageKit (IDE's, build tools, etc.)?  Is
> I'd say use whatever you want for development, it doesn't even have to be IDE.
> Vim, Emacs, Anjuta, KDevelop, etc .... all works. As far as build system goes,
> we are using autotools.
> > there any other information that would be important to know before I get
> > started?

Play with git -- it's a very useful tool. You don't have to know all the
commands, but it's useful to be able to know how to commit, pull, push
etc. If you want, I'll arrange so that you can push to the main
developer repo and you can come an official contributor to PackageKit.

Richard