So if some random guy wanted to get himself involved in the development of Ardour, what would be a good course of action to take? Keep in mind this particular guy:
a. Has not programmed in C++ (or C or assembly) for, oh, four years or so, but would love to start again. Additionally, he has been a Linux-only user for a year and a half, but development on said platform would be new to me…er… him.
b. Uses Ardour semi-profesionally, and so would like to keep the stable version up and running next to the ongoing version.
I plan on downloading the development version and browsing the code. Anyone have any suggestions as to a good way to start wrapping my head around the Ardour code? Refreshers on C++ in general? Also any suggestions for cleanly implementing item (b) above would be appreciated.
I’m new to open-source development as well; Is there some etiquette I should know up front? For example, would it be prudent for a new guy to join the development mailing list, just to get up-to-speed with what’s going on?
You should drop into the #ardour channel on irc.freenode.net.
Not that I would call myself a developer, but I think you can forget about understanding the code base as a whole … you should pick a single aspect/feature of interest.
im not sure if it will work, but maybe scons PREFIX=/some/unique/path should work? you would have to start ardour with /some/unique/path/ardour2, but it might work (???)
i’m no developer, but so far no one has complained about my presence on linux-audio-developers mailing list and i don’t see why anything would be different here, so sign up in fact i find it very helpful to see where people are going with some projects and often my questions are answered before i need to ask them. the main difference with ardour development i think is that there is not so much traffic in the mailing lists as there is on irc, so i’d recommend lurking on the ardour channel if you want to get a feel for things (the don’t bite).
porl
ps. maybe it would be useful for future reference to have some form of searchable irc logs? might save a lot of faqs…
edit: ok, i didn’t read thorwil’s statement about irc, so i feel redundant now… well, do what he said!
you could as a starter use the very easy-to-use SourceNavigator (open source software made by redhat people, quite some time ago). I don’t know if it is updated regularly but I used to use this application a lot in the past. Or you could use Eclipse (way more ambitious) but maybe ardour is too small a project to consider such a framework. There are many other things out there that could help you out browsing the code in a smart way. SourceNav is one of the most straightforward. Just build a sourcenav database from the dev version of ardour source code (cross references take some time to be built up, be patient) and there you go.
