[openbeos] Re: Getting started

Ladies and Gentlemen, Sikosis just volunteered to write the next newsletter article! ;-)

Please, take this missive this as the vociferous musings of an [insert invective here], and feel free to publicly smack me upside the head with a clue-by-four if I've missed something...

Phil, a newsletter article is a wonderful idea, holler if you would like a collaborator ;-). Considering the archival and easily forgotten nature of newsletters I was leaning towards something a little more easily accessible; a "breadth versus depth" kind of thing; pardon my corporate-speak parlance. The fact that David had to quiz the list to find out what was necessary to contribute to our project makes me wonder how many other potential developers we've lost because there were no clear-cut guidelines for our project's efforts. (Gag! How Dilbert-esque can one get? PHB! Urgh.)

To really illustrate this point: I can go to any of half a dozen or so other open source projects and, within a couple of minutes spelunking said site/s, determine what I need to begin contributing to said project WRT toolchain, coding standards, &c. I would expect the same metric to hold true for our project. F'rinstance, if I go to our "Dev Central" page to determine WTF I need to do to get going, I don't see a durned thing related to what's needed to begin developing and contributing to our project outside a few ancillary binaries. What I *do see* is a "Getting Started (not written)" bullet item, which has been there for at least one and one-half years now. I feel that at the very least there should be a FAQ entry or some such.

Speaking of FAQ stuff, we still link to Donovan's e-mail address as the newsletter editor. Methinks this needs updating.

Just poking holes in a few things that need some TLC...

Pending any objections, I would like to volunteer to take on the task of gathering, coordinating and publishing a set of requirements needed for potential contributors to begin working with our our project; this might also include any other areas of our project's documentation that need some TLC. All work to be peer reviewed, of course.

As always, comments, suggestions, et al welcomed.

Hasta la vista,
Scott "Have You Seen My Stapler" Mansfield


On Saturday, Aug 23, 2003, at 03:29 America/Los_Angeles, Phil Greenway (Sikosis) wrote:

do I smell a newsletter article ?

- Sikosis

Quoting Scott Mansfield <thephantom@xxxxxxx>:

I've been frustrated by this as well, especially during development of
the Network kit (which seemed especially sensitive to compiler versions
for some unknown reason). When I first started with the project I had
to drill through the newsletters archive to find out what was required
for OBOS development (issue 13, "So, you wanna be an OBOS developer",
IIRC). IM[not so]HO, it would behoove us to document a set of minimum
requirements for the toolchain somewhere on our site and in a more
prominent place, maybe on the "Dev Central" page. Better yet, perhaps
we could include a download link on said page for the complete
toolchain (including the updated cvs, ld, and jam stuff), that way
we're all using the same set of development tools (?). Standards are a
good thing sometimes. :-)

For whatever it's worth I've been using the BeOS Max 3 beta 2 and am
quite happy with it.  Vasper has done a really good job in maintaining
this distro.

Just my two bits, not trying to stir up trouble.

Cheers,
Scott

On Friday, Aug 22, 2003, at 19:12 America/Los_Angeles, Andrew Bachmann
wrote:

On Fri, 22 Aug 2003 21:23:44 -0400 EDT "Jared Eldredge" <jared@xxxxxx>
wrote: 
David
i believe that gcc 2.95.3 is the right compiler.  OBOS uses JAM for
its
build system and you should probably have some software for that as
well.

No,

Please do not use gcc 2.95.3. It seems you are looking at an older
version
of BeOS MAX since they have (AFAIK) corrected this oversight in the
current version. Use either the gcc included in R5 (from 1999) or the
geekgadgets gcc. (from 2000, version 2.9-beos-000224) If they still
have
not fixed the BeOS MAX "distro" then you can still install it and
install
one of the working compilers over it. (or just switch to the other
compiler if it turns out to be bundled with it as well)

could someone with more experience please reply for David with a list
of the software tools required/useful for diving into the code base?

As it was mentioned earlier, you can find all of the open-beos specific
tools at this page: http://open-beos.sourceforge.net/dev.php
Please note that you will have to remake the jam from cvs after you do
a checkout. You can do this by running the web jam in the tools
subdir.

Andrew










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