[Linuxmce-project] All Developers, please read.

[Thom C. <tho...@gm...>]

I have cross-posted this to the Developers forum, as well.

note: this thread is intended to instigate discussion, and to try to
generate a plan of attack.

I am noticing something _very_ disturbing here, that I feel must be
dealt with especially given the relatively young age of this fork of
the project.

LinuxMCE developers (both present and future) have inherited a very
large code base from a developer who took a very straightforward (from
their perspective) approach to putting together a device agnostic
messaging system and a drawing-independent user interface system for
the purpose of home control and the delivery of media.

Notice, I said, from their perspective. This is very important,
because for a lot of us, we came here at the viewing of the LinuxMCE
demo videos. They _are_ very intoxicating, and do serve to generate a
ton of excitement.

And after those of us who do manage to get the system built, and
running, a lot of us immediately see something, as developers, that we
want to work on...

now what?

we start digging into the system, and find that a great big part of it
is still very black-boxed, not in the sense that we can't see it and
mess with it, but in the sense that there are a great number of moving
parts, all working like a swiss watch, to ensure that this system DOES
run like an appliance. And some of us do manage to understand bits of
the system and realise just how clever parts of it really are.

Assuming we get past all of this, and we see things we want to
improve, what are our options?

We have some reference material on both the LinuxMCE and Plutohome.com
wiki sites, which relate to programmer material. However, this
material is still very sparse once you actually read through it. It
becomes very difficult to get a systems-level overview to figure out
which direction you need to go in, to modify, or augment a particular
feature. It seems that Plutohome never got around to writing stuff
down that their programming staff obviously knew, and this is
understandable, they make their money doing custom development, and I
am not knocking anything done up to this point.

We need to figure out, as a community, what to do next.

* Can we coordinate with Pluto to get the missing pieces of
programming information? if not, we need to do a full audit of the
code-base.
* We need to get the missing tools built and accessible, they do exist
in SVN, but they need to be brought out in a form that can easily be
installed and used. This includes the Designer and the DCEGen tools.
* Skin development/refinement. We need lots of polishing work done on
the user interface, although again, information on this process is
limited, what are all our options herE?
* Device driver stuff. This one is pretty obvious, and it will get
done, but we need to get a library of knowledge established to allow
motivated developers to fill in more hardware support. again, obvious,
duh, but it does need to be on this list.

I have a fairly complete media-centric set-up (complete with an XL1B
jukebox), and will slowly be folding in home automation. But, there
are various things I keep noticing, that I want desperately to work
on, but I am finding more and more, there are missing tools and pieces
which, while they don't stop development for me entirely, do impede it
significantly.

Just my thoughts, what do you all think?
-Thom