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RE: [ve-dev] Understanding this huge pile of code... ;-)
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Title: Message
> I ran into this too, so one for the "newbie to VE"
FAQ for sure
I'll add this to the
FAQ.
That's
an OK solution for the near term.
Longer
term, we need to shoot toward getting to a point where any arbitrary
user can also be a developer of *our* code base, not just a client of it who
adds plug-ins to it.
This
is one thing software based on the GNU toolchain does right. Given any
arbitrary source tarball, I can extract it, cd into the resulting dir and (as
root) type:
./configure && make && make install
to
build and install it from source. Barring missing dependencies, this
basically just always works.
Notice
how this makes the barrier to entry to hack on the code exactly zero if you're
already a programmer. Just cd into a source directory, fire up your
favorite editor, and get coding away.
And it
works. In multiple instances, I've gotten suckered into hacking on
something I never intended to (and then contributing my work back) simply
because the code was so easily available. ;-)
Long
term, I'd *really* like to see how low we can get the barrier to entry for
hacking (in the good sense of the word) on the VE source
base.
> Coincidentally, getting started on the VE sources
involves a pretty
> steep learning curve (even steeper if your Eclipse
knowledge is not
> already at expert level). Is there, or do you
recommend, a high level
> architecture document, that could explain the
architectural concepts of
> the VE plug-in - from a high level of
course.
Unfortunately nope. We have
opened anything up yet for developers, so we have no documentation to do that.
That is one of the to-do's for when we create a true SDK for extenders and
developers.
This is something that we who are learning the code
base can contribute. I'm thinking about blogging about my experiences in
the near term as a way to capture them and pass them on immediately.
Longer term, we can collect those experiences into articles/documents/white
papers...
Dave
