On Sat, 2010-11-13 at 19:37 +0000, Shane Fagan wrote: > Hey Maciej, > > Well on the book thing we cant really make one. The apis change so much > it would make any book obsolete after a year or so. Like currently we > are moving very soon from GTK+ 2 - 3 so it would be a little insane to > write a book on either since GTK 3 isnt ready yet and 2 is going out > very soon. > > Since things evolve so fast in the open source world its hard to > document stuff in a stable way without the risk of obsolescence.
Hey, The fact that we can't write a book about our platform is an indication that there is something terribly wrong with the platform itself. It's as simple as that. Change is meaningless if you can't keep up with it. an incomplete and terse library API reference is not enough to convince anyone, but CS majors and freedom lovers, to write new applications. Not only should a book be written but it's getting to the point where such a book becomes a necessity - we provide dozens of libraries and services that developers should be aware of in order to create amazing applications for Ubuntu but we don't provide any documentation for them - if you are lucky you will get an up-to-date API reference. If you aren't you will have to spend hours browsing Google to find some scattered informations, some of which may be relevant. We are getting to the point when just saying "sorry, but it's to hard" is not a good enough excuse. Yes, we can still use a "we do it for free" excuse but Canonical can't - they obviously see the correlation between getting developers onto Ubuntu wagon and crossing the chasm so it's time to do something to make it easier for developers to start applications. Quickly is nice but it doesn't really change much if there is no documentation to speak of for the platform. Code samples are going to take you only so far [1] [1] sure, you can learn everything about platform just by reading code but no one who makes living from writing applications is going to do that. Cheers, KK -- Krzysztof Klimonda <[email protected]> -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
