2006/12/25, Peter Morgan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
As a new user to the platform I'm inclined to agree on most of these points. I also maintain the Smarty.php.net docs and am an active member of developer.mozilla.com so I understand some of the problems with doc/site maintenance. There are a few points I'd like to throw in for my "tuppany's" worth, and would also like to contribute as I'm now using pyGTK for all desktop (x-platfrom) apps. Next year will be pygtk for me and am so looking forward. Biggest problem in my opinion is that the site is not sure whether its catering for the pygtk developers, or the end users.
I agree. Whether the tutorial should be in a wiki? This is a big step and indeed a
lot of my time spent on dev.mozilla is in migrating documents. Its wonderful to see how over time it gets crafted with links here and little tweaks. The biggest problem with a wiki in addition to CPU resources is authentication and rouge editors, however these do tend to be few and far between from my experience - if wikipedia can survive it then i don't see a big problem. If I was to recommend a wiki then I would suggest Bitweaver.
We already have live.gnome.org/PyGTK, btw, I think that we need consensus on how to write documentation on the wiki, so we can export it into various formats. Maybe people from library.gnome.org could help us here. As far as the tutorials go there is a mega one there already at
http://pygtk.org/pygtk2tutorial/ thansk to John Finlay, last updated in March 2006, This is good, however its more like a Guide book than a tutorial imho. Some of the most invaluable tutorials appear off the main site, eg one that helped me was the pygtk with glade. Couldn't these appear on the main pygtk site? it would make it more official and up to a coding standard.
That's exactly one of the things that I would like to adress out. The pygtk tutorial is a direct translation from the Gtk+ tutorial (which I understand that makes mantainability easier), but being the main source of documentation, people don't have an obvious way to learn how to use it. IMHO the tutorial is closer to the class reference than being a document to teach how to program with pygtk. I think that the main document on the site should be small, and should teach the main tools to learn how to solve the most common problems when it comes to build cross-platform interfaces. We have a lot of this kind of documentation on the FAQ, we only need to choose which pieces of the FAQ are more interesting for newcomers and build the tutorial-for-newbies. One of the most valuable resources is the pygtk FAQ - however sometimes its
slow. Again shouldn't this be on the main site and maintained? www.async.com.br/*faq*/*pygtk*/index.py. Mainly so editors have permission with one common login Also one last point is for windows users, they are the biggest market. Indeed I checked pygtk, then went for mono and gtk# and after 2 days, realised that the install to windows was going to be a nightmare and came back to pygtk ;-). I've even been thinking about creating a "Windows install pack" than installs python, gtk, pygtk, cairo.. the whole lot, just for my own deployments. It took me sometime to figure it out and as a newbie, getting my head around all the versions was confusing to say the least, particularly as a lot of the elements were on different other sites. Windows users expect to have an installer, that's one of the great things about vb.net. Maybe NSIS would be a good solution http://nsis.sourceforge.net/ ?
I've been learning NSIS by helping out to improve the cherokee installer, I think a bundled installer would be easy, I just need to figure out how to perform a silent install with the python's .msi and the gtk+. I started a thread about this some time ago, there wasn't much discussion. It makes no sense for me the need of three different installers. Two of them outside of the site (python and gtk+ from gladewin32). This only rise the entry wall for newbies. Anyway, just some thoughts. Keep of the good work and I want to contribute.
Then you are a perfect candidate for the IRC meeting on wednesday :P -- Un saludo, Alberto Ruiz
_______________________________________________ pygtk mailing list [email protected] http://www.daa.com.au/mailman/listinfo/pygtk Read the PyGTK FAQ: http://www.async.com.br/faq/pygtk/
