Updated developer documentation available for review

[Alexander Larsson]

On Tue, 2017-01-17 at 12:52 +0000, Allan Day wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 4:14 PM, Allan Day <aday at gnome.org> wrote:
> ... 
> > Before we do make the switch, it would be great if people could
> > check the documentation over - I'm sure that there will be odd
> > mistakes that I've missed.
> > 
> > Pull requests would be really welcome. You can also report issues
> > [3].
> > 
> 
> I noticed a couple of important things that are missing from the
> docs, by the way. The first is documentation on using Flatpak as a
> development environment. This could mention Builder but should
> probably have command line instructions too.

Anyone wanna write this?

> The second thing is a lack of documentation on which runtime app
> authors should use (this is maybe something for the runtimes page on
> the website). Obvious questions I found myself asking included:
> Is the GNOME runtime just for GNOME applications?
> Which versions of which libraries are in each runtime?
> Since the Freedesktop runtime is described as minimal, does that mean
> it is something that people should use? Or does minimal mean that
> it's not worthwhile? (In other words - which types of apps is it good
> for?)
> Allan

The actual runtimes do have some manifest files in /usr, but there is
no easy way to link to these from the website. Maybe we should write
some script to automatically generate lists based on them.

The gnome runtime is based on the freedesktop runtime, so it is a
proper superset. Same goes for the kde one. The freedesktop one is
"minimal" in some sense, but its still usable. In particular it is
useful for games that don't need a lot of platform, and for apps that
don't need the "latest and greatest" platform apis, but instead value
the longer support time of the freedesktop.org runtime (it doesn't rev
every 6 months like the gnome one). For instance, its probably a good
choice for typical binary-only apps that already bundle most of their
dependencies.