halting problem :: Reviving the GTK development blog

:: ~2 min read

The GTK+ project has a development blog.

I know it may come as a shock to many of you, and you’d be completely justified in thinking that I just made that link up — but the truth is, the GTK+ project has had a development blog for a long while.

Sadly, the blog hasn’t been updated in five years — mostly around the time 3.0 was released, and the GTK+ website was revamped; even before that, the blog was mostly used for release announcements, which do not make for very interesting content.

Like many free and open source software projects, GTK+ has various venues of interaction between its contributors and its users; mailing lists, personal blogs, IRC, Stack Overflow, reddit, and many, many other channels. In this continuum of discussions it’s both easy to get lost and to lose the sense of having said things before — after all, if I repeat something at least three times a week on three different websites for three years, how can people still not know about it? Some users will always look at catching up after three years, because their projects live on very different schedules that the GTK releases one; others will try to look for official channels, even if the free and open source software landscape has fragmented to such a degree that any venue can be made “official” by the simple fact of having a contributor on it; others again will look at the API reference for any source of truth, forgetting, possibly, that if everything went into the API reference then it would cease to be useful as a reference.

The GTK+ development blog is not meant to be the only source for truth, or the only “official” channel; it’s meant to be a place for interesting content regarding the project, for developers using GTK+ or considering to use it; a place that acts as a hub to let interested people discover what’s up with GTK+ itself but that don’t want to subscribe to the commits list or join IRC.

From an editorial standpoint, I’d like the GTK+ development blog to be open to contribution from people contributing to GTK+; using GTK+; and newcomers to the GTK+ code base and their experiences. What’s a cool GTK+ feature that you worked on? How did GTK+ help you in writing your application or environment? How did you find contributing to GTK+ for the first time? If you want to write an article for the GTK+ blog talking about this, then feel free to reach out to me with an outline, and I’ll be happy to help you.

In the meantime, the first post in the This Week in GTK+ series has gone up; you’ll get a new post about it every Monday, and if you want to raise awareness on something that happened during a week, feel free to point it out on the wiki.

glib gtk development gnome blag

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