Developer's corner

Contact

How to report a bug

To fill a bug report for GCompris, you must use the gnome bugzilla and select GCompris in the product list.

Mailing list

You can join and browse the GCompris mailing list.

This mailing list is used by the developers and users willing to stay aware of what’s going on. You will get new release announcements. Users can join the list and report bugs, discuss feature they would like to have, ...

The language is English. There is also a user mailing list in French and in Portuguese. If you want to create a user list in your language, please contact me (bruno.coudoin@gcompris.net).

Chat

You can enter in contact with the users and developers of GCompris on IRC. The server is irc.freenode.net on the channel #gcompris.

To join an IRC server, you can use the excellent xchat software or directly in your browser.

Compilation

Source code

We use git for our development. The git repository is hosted by Gnome but we also have a GitHub mirror.

To get the GCompris master branch (warning this takes more than 500MB) :

git clone git://git.gnome.org/gcompris
cd gcompris
sh autogen.sh && make

Alternatively, if you are only interested in the recent history, and would want to send in fixes as patches, you can use the option: git clone --depth=1 git://git.gnome.org/gcompris. It will save you more than 100MB.

Dependencies

GCompris has a lot of dependencies. On a Debian based distribution that already packages GCompris, you can install all the required dependencies with the command 'apt-get build-dep gcompris'.

Compilation

Download the archive gcompris-X.X.tar.gz or get it from git then:

• tar -xvf gcompris-X.X.tar.gz
• cd gcompris-X.X
• sh configure

Analyse, the errors, install the missing dependancies. Often you will have to install the -devel packages on your distribution. On Ubuntu or Debian, you can get all the build dependancies with the command ’apt-get build-dep gcompris’.

Then run:

• make
• make install

Installation

We do our best to let GCompris run on as many software and hardware platform as we can. In this section, we list the supported platform and specific installation instructions.

Packagers

GCompris is a large software which has numerous dependencies. We ask packagers to be very careful and follow this minimal and manual test process.

Translations

• GCompris translations are managed by the Gnome translation teams.
• Translation status for the Software itself.
• Translation addons. There is more than the .po file to translation GCompris.
• Voices translation.
• Web site translation is managed by volunteers.
• Color translation

Development

Documentation of the Qt Quick Version (Under development)

This is a new version of GCompris based on the Qt Quick technology. Our users expect us to deliver a version that runs on Desktop and on Tablets. Sadly with the Gtk+ version these was no easy way to achieve this. The decision has been taken to rewrite completely GCompris on a new framework. This is a departure from the Gtk+ development framework that was based on the C and the Python language. Now the development will be done with a mix of QML, Javascipt and C++.

The rewrite will not happen overnight and we need your help. If you are interesting in discovering the Qt Quick technology while doing something useful, you can do the port of a GCompris activity.

• Qt Quick source repository
• Qt Quick development process
• Qt Quick Migration status

Documentation of the Gtk+ Version (Legacy)

This is the desktop application that contains 140 activities. It is under maintenance but no new development are added to it.

• GCompris internals gives an overview of the design of GCompris. It is a good starting point for anybody willing to contribute code.
• Adding an activity
• Adding a puzzle activity
• Adding an explore activity
• Adding a music activity and using gcomprismusic.py module

New contributor

If you want to develop a new activity for GCompris a god start is to follow the instructions on this page : An exercise for new contributors.

The Drawing board

These are pages to hold the different discussion for things we are working on:

• Ideas for activities
• Star system review
• Todo for OLPC/sugar future ? Review of sugar/OLPC activities and way to integrate.
• Notes on OSX port
• Language Learning
• Writing tutor
• Wiktionary to XML