[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Start development.

[David Bruce]

Hi Bart,


>> OK, you need to log into alioth and request to join project tux4kids,
>> and I will add you.
> Just tried to, I'll wait for you to add me.

I just added you.

> I'm studying autotools, SDL, GIT, (CMake) and the terminal... It looks
> great, but not easy to learn. Huge presentation for autotools...

For now, you could just remember "autoreconf -i; ./configure; make;
sudo make install".  A very slightly more complex setup that you
probably want to do is to build from a separate build directory under
the top level directory.  If you do that, you would run the following
(from within build/:)
autoreconf -i ..
../configure
make
sudo make install.

That way you keep built files mostly separate from the git-tracked
files.  btw, "autoreconf" usually only needs to be done once after the
git checkout, and once you've built the program you just have to run
"make" from the build directory to re-build it.

> * Tried to install KDevelop, but it doesn't run! After investigation
> Code::Blocks seems to be most suitable.
> * Vi and Vim are no option, I'm spoiled by Visual Studio and Code Composer
> on Windows.

You can use any text editor and then run the build and git commands
from the command line.  Vim is great but it takes quite a while to
learn, same for Emacs.  But you can use any easy GUI editor like Kate
(for KDE) or GEdit (for GNOME). It makes no difference, just save the
text files, cd to your build directory and run "make".

> * Also here, I never used command-line in Rational Clear Case and
> Clearquest... but I will learn.

As a really bare minimum, you need to know:
git pull (to pull in any new changes from the master repository)
git add <filename> (to start tracking a new file)
git commit -a (to commit the changes in files to your local repository)
git push (to push your changes back into the master repository)

But you also really should read about basic branching and merging very early on.

> I'm looking at the code already from read-only files. Is there a good reason
> to keep it in C?
> Because for this kind of program, OO & C++ would be more suitable I guess...

If I were to start tuxmath or tuxtype again from scratch, I would do
them in C++ (or maybe even try to write them as web apps that could be
played within a browser).  There are definitely many places where
classes with methods and inheritance would be handy. But I'm not sure
it would be worth it now to try to move to C++.

David Bruce