[Goodies-dev] Newbie wants to work on xfce4-cpugraph-plugin

[Florian Rivoal]

On Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:46:06 -0700, Christian Leitold
<christian.leitold at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello everyone,

Hi, welcome!

> I hope this is even the right place for my questions!

It definitely is. Here, or xfce4-dev at xfce.org.

> I have just switched from Gnome to XFCE and thought this was a good
> opportunity to start working on a small issue which has bothered me
> for quite some time now. In Gnome 2, they had this nice System Monitor
> panel plugin, which I liked a lot. Now, I would like to have a similar
> panel applet for my XFCE desktop. The xfce4-cpugraph-plugin is already
> very nice, however, I would like to tune it a little bit

I am the current maintainer of the cpugraph plugin, and a bunch of other
plugins. I agree that panel plugins are a good starting point. They are
useful real programs, yet they are small enough to be relatively easy to
dig into without much prior knowledge.

Personally, I've lacked free time recently to get much done, so
help would definitely be welcome.

> and possibly
> add some new features, like a second graph for network load, etc.

There is already xfce4-systemload-plugin, xfce4-netload-plugin and a
few others that can be used to track various things, event though they
behave quite differently. I completely agree that consolidating them
into one, combining their respective strengths would be a good thing,
and I've been wanting to do that for quite a while, but I've just not
had the time so far.

> Thus, I would like to get some advice on how to start. I have already
> downloaded the latest source code via git and installed all the
> necessary development libraries, so at least the code does compile.

I think a simple way to get started is to pick a bug in bugzilla (or
report a new one if your favorite problem isn't listed) and try to
do something about it. If you manage to make a fix, you can turn it
into a patch and attach that to the bug, and send a mail to the list
asking for feedback about it.

If you get stuck, the mailing lists or the irc channels are good
places to turn to to ask for advice. Just be aware that there
are not that number of people who can answer is limited, and that
we don't necessarily have a lot of free time.

> Concerning my background, you have to know that I'm definitely not a
> master hacker in any sense. So far, I have written a fair amount of
> scientific code in Fortran, C++ and a little bit of C, but never a
> "real" program with graphics and all that. I hope, this will change
> soon ;-) ...

Just curious. What kind of scientific programs were you working on?

Cheers,

    - Florian