Updated developer documentation available for review

[Allan Day]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 2:44 PM, Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com> wrote:
...

> > 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?
>

If anyone wants to throw comments or rough notes my way, I'd be happy to
write it up. I just need the technical details.


> > 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.
>

TingPing has cooked something up for the GNOME runtime [1]. It would be
great to have a list of what's in the Freedesktop one too.

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.
>

If we say that Freedesktop is good for games and the GNOME runtime is for
GNOME apps, we leave a lot of apps without an obvious choice. Given that
it's currently a binary choice for which runtime you pick, it might be best
to phrase our advice in those terms. For example: "the GNOME runtime is
appropriate if you use the GNOME platform; for anything else, the
Freedesktop runtime is recommended".

Allan

[1] https://gist.github.com/TingPing/65509ee3608d82e17dd09ef8c63a3ef1
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