[Discuss] seeking places for good discussion about GNU/Linux programming topics

[Daniel M Gessel]

On 2022-10-28 11:30, grg wrote:

Thanks for the feedback, it's very helpful!

> On Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 06:45:55PM -0400, Daniel M Gessel wrote:
>> I'm looking for lively and welcoming discussion boards to chat about
>> programming topics, with a focus on C coding. Some sample topics might be
>> using Wayland or the layers compositors are built on, such as KMS/GBM/DRM;
>> GL and/or Vulkan both with and without Wayland; inter-process communication
>> and shared memory; setting up the process address space, and user space
>> fault handling.
> imho no better way to learn than to start doing among experts who have a
> vested interest in your getting it done right.  start by joining an active
> open-source project, read the mailing list, look over the code and even
> review some pull requests, grab some coding tasks that are closest to your
> interests and get suggestions on approaches/code reviews/other feedback
> (thick skin often helps here ;).
Good thoughts. I'm oriented to being a "client" of existing projects, 
but maybe I ought to be striving to be a "contributor".

I admit to feeling intimidated tho': I have thin skin and I'm not 
entirely neurotypical (I often can't tell if I'm thinking outside the 
box or if I just have no idea what the box is; this project is a bit of 
a personal sandbox in response to that experience), but I will see how 
far I can get myself to go.
> if there are close "competitor" projects to the project you're founding
> (I can't tell from your description exactly what that might be) you could
> join in a couple of those; else going off what you wrote the mesa3d project
> or the wayland project seem like they code in the space you're interested in
> and have active communities; I bet both even have some developer docs on how
> they work.
My main CS interests have been Programming Languages and Graphics since 
my undergrad days, and I mostly worked on graphics drivers as a career.

My thinking is very exploratory (unfocused might be more accurate) at 
this point. I only recently remembered Project Oberon, which might be 
the best way to convey what I'm after.  Honestly, I'm probably in the 
"retro" and "hobby" categories. Alternatively OpenSCAD, or some "IDE" 
for Generative Art, would be exciting. I had a bit of this going at one 
point, but I was unhappy with where I'd ended up at the time and am 
restarting from scratch.
>> An (almost) unrelated topic is alternatives to GitHub for git hosting.
>> GitHub has nice features and a large community of developers, but I'd like a
>> backup plan.
> backup plan in case of what?
> (fwiw, I find it extremely unlikely github just goes away without notice...)
The possibility of the current owners becoming "bad actors" seems real. 
I understand some projects relocated after the acquisition out of the 
same concern.  They've already engaged in practices that might be 
considered a bit iffy, but the site offers tremendously useful services.
> git is distributed - any one of your clones is as good as the upstream, so
> even if github gets nuked you're never more than a couple commands away from
> having new git hosting.  if you're thinking of hosting your project on "an
> old laptop [you] ssh into for git/backup" (don't!), that git push is all
> there is to re-hosting.
I've confounded "backup plan" for GitHub becoming a less comfortable 
place and "backup plan" to keep from losing my code when I drop my 
laptop down a storm grate. I understand my habit of backing up to 
floppies is of no help with the former.
> except you really want more than that -- you want an issue tracker, you want
> ci(/cd), you want pull request management, you want a project homepage, you
> want a mailing list, etc -- gitlab and github both offer all these, and there
> are tools for moving much of the content between them in case you want to
> re-host (and I think all(?) of it can be moved between gitlab servers).
It's good to know rehosting all the data accumulated by a project is an 
option. I really don't know much about the back ends of these sites and 
what access they give to the "meta" content stored outside of a repository.
> mesa3d and wayland are both hosted on freedesktop.org and use the gitlab
> they run there.  your new project sounds like it has a good chance of
> qualifying for free hosting there, with the huge advantage that it's where
> the community of people who code this stuff already hangs out:
> 	https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/NewProject/
Yeah - you're absolutely right this makes sense. I've had a harder time 
locating KMS which seems have a less clear home; discussion seems to be 
on freedesktop but the code hosted with the kernel. I dissected kmscube 
at one point, the standard KMS sample code, and that is hosted on 
freedesktop's GitLab instance.
> On Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 11:19:48AM -0400, Daniel M Gessel wrote:
>> Maybe I haven't found the right link, but it looks like GitLab is going
>> commercial and placing restrictions on their free offerings.
> "GitLab Ultimate and 50,000 CI/CD minutes are free for qualifying open
> source projects."
> 	https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/
>
>
> freedesktop.org might be your best option, gitlab would be a good option,
> github would be a good option... imho running a git server on an old laptop
> is not a good option if you want anyone other than yourself to ever have
> anything to do with your project.  but jump into a couple projects first to
> learn not only what you wanted to learn but also some open-source project
> management tools and techniques along the way.
I'm vaguely aware my goals are probably a little too personal, too "my 
own little world", to make a good open source project (right now - maybe 
that will change).  I've thought of breaking out modules to share and 
enrich, but I'm ahead of myself even with that.

Contributing to an existing project is a great place to start - I'll 
head this direction and see where it leads.

Thanks!

Dan