gtkmm book

Over the past few weeks I have gradually updated the widget-specific chapters in the Programming with gtkmm book, and I’m mostly finished now. This became a lot easier after I gave up trying to keep inline example code in sync with the real source files. Unfortunately DocBook XML currently has no way to include example code, so we might have to do some perl processing later – at the moment we just link to the examples directories.

I have also added screenshots of all the examples, which seems to make it more appealing. Apart from the Basics section and the in-depth appendices, I don’t really think that the book can provide much more information than the reference documentation. That’s because the reference documentation is so good. Again, I chose to add links to the reference docs instead of duplicating the information in the book. If this is ever published on paper, it would make sense to put the reference docs in the same book.

We do still need to write a real step-by-step tutorial. I’m trying to think of a worthwhile, but not too complicated, example.

I’m now on the GNOME release-team, because telsa didn’t have enough time anymore. I will try to be useful. I’m making a list of stuff to pay attention to. Ideally that list will become a How-To-Get-Involved-By-Doing-Simple-Stuff page.

I have switched to jhbuild instead of vicious-build-scripts to build GNOME from CVS, because it seems to handle multiple autotools versions better, and it’s more intelligent when dealing with failed modules. For the past few weeks I have been guilty of waiting for someone else to fix jhbuild build breakages, but this week I finally gave in and started investigating stuff myself.

I replaced my Redhat 7.3 with Redhat 8. It really is a lot better and more consistent. Plus, it’s great to finally use gcc 3.2.

I read Maus 1 and 2, in German.