tl;dr: Check out the new GNOME Programming Guidelines and file bugs in Bugzilla.

Now, to some of the results of the hackfest. In the last week or so, I’ve been working on expanding the GNOME programming guidelines, upstreaming various bits of documentation which Collabora have been writing for a customer who is using the GNOME stack in a large project. The guidelines were originally written in the early days of GNOME by Federico, Miguel and Morten; Federico updated them in 2013, and now they’ve been expanded again.

It looks like these guidelines can fill one of the gaps we currently have in documentation, where we need to recommend best practices and give tutorial-style examples, but gtk-doc–generated API manuals are not the right place. For example, the new guidelines include recommendations for making libraries parallel-installable (based off Havoc’s original article, with permission); or recommendations for choosing where to store data (in GSettings, a serialised GVariant store, or a full-on GOM/SQLite database?). The guidelines are intended to be useful to all developers, although inherently need to target newer developers more, so may simplify a few things.

I’ve still got some ideas for things to add. For example, I need to rework some of my blog posts about GMainContext into an article, since we should be documenting before blogging. Other ideas are very welcome, as is criticism, feedback and improvements: please file a bug against gnome-devel-docs. Thanks to the documentation team for their help and reviews!

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