Does Gnome not want developers, or what?

"Use the source, Luke." This is the mantra of programmers around the world, at least those of us who aren't completely attached to Bill Gates' teats and the associated pap that comes from them. The assumption has always been that learning from the code you admire is the most effective way of learning useful programming.

Sometimes, this is difficult in practice. I'm trying to write a relatively simple outlining program for writers, and I'm calling it Plotlines. "Relatively" being the operative phrase here.

( The outline. For geeks only. )

Okay, so all of that sounds ambitious. I imagine it is. And I'd like to write it using Gnome. But Gnome doesn't make this easy. It's unbelievably poorly documented, written in six different language (M4? Who writes in M4 anymore?), uses the Gnu build system which trades power for simplicity (guess which one it doesn't have). I spent an hour this afternoon trying to download the example on how to build documentation into your system-- that's poorly documented.

About the best solution I've had is to take apart a couple of my favorite applications-- gthumb and bluefish-- and see how they do things. Bluefish is probably more appropriate to my needs, but I spent most of today inside gthumb because it's just so much more complete.

I don't really expect to have my hand held through all of this. I just wish that open source programmers spent a little more time explaining how their interfaces are supposed to work. Especially when they're as useful, as powerful, as complete, and as ubiquitous as Gnome promises to be.