pictures slideshow, and navigating the source code?

[dahlheim]

first post.  i've no idea how to do so, as i've never worked on an open-source project before, but i did a lot of coding many years ago, and i'm interested in implementing a fullscreen slideshow feature into the pictures viewer.  i thought it might not be exceedingly difficult(?) to find the code that produces the flickr slideshow and alter it to accomplish this (i'd assume that might also involve resizing images).  i downloaded the source code to investigate this and, well, there's a lot of it of course.  how does one navigate the source code to find where things are?  is there some sort of map?  gps? 

thanks in advance for any guidance.

EDIT:  i guess i should elaborate.  what i imagined was playing around with this idea on my machine until i decided it was impossible or until i was successful.  i also assume the task is more difficult than it seems.  is it considered bad etiquette in such a forum to petition help for such an endeavor when the inevitable confusion arises?  i've no idea how such impressive open development works...

[chewi]

You propably want to have a look at these postings:
http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=2713.0
http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=2662.0
http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=2628.0

Seems they did some things to do this. If you want to do it yourself or improve it, it should give you the right entry-points.

[dahlheim]

wow, i must be a bad searcher.  thanks.

[Zaerc]

i downloaded the source code to investigate this and, well, there's a lot of it of course.  how does one navigate the source code to find where things are?  is there some sort of map?  gps? 

Well I usually just do something like:

Code: [Select]

find . -type f -exec grep 'whatToLookFor' '{}' /dev/null \; but there might be better/faster/easier ways out there.

[Matthew]

The browsable source code repository at http://svn.charonmedia.com/trac.cgi/browser might help you.

[chewi]

EDIT:  i guess i should elaborate.  what i imagined was playing around with this idea on my machine until i decided it was impossible or until i was successful.  i also assume the task is more difficult than it seems.  is it considered bad etiquette in such a forum to petition help for such an endeavor when the inevitable confusion arises?  i've no idea how such impressive open development works...

First I'd recomment not to edit a posting if you have an additional question... Just answer your own post...

Second: If you are working and have a certain problem you can post like this:
I want to do this.
To to this I have done that.
I ran into this problem at that point.
Does anyone have any additional ideas ?

If someone does have an idea, he/she will propably help you.

If you only want to make a feature request because you cannot code and do not have the time to learn it, go to the feature-request forum and discribe your idea there.
The feature-request-forum can be seen as an inspiration for developers. So if someone thinks it's a good idea, he/she is going to try it out. But there's no guaratee.
Discussions about the value of a certain feature belongs into the feature-request forum as well.

The difference between open-source and commercial feature request is that the developers decide for themselves if they want to take on a task. In commercial fields it's only the production manager that makes all the decisions sometimes taking finacials into account. in OSS it's more democratic, i guess.

Of course, you can try to find a developer to do the work for you and pay him. Or set a bounty for a certain feature. See the market place for that.

(maybe some delcaration like this should be made a sticky post in the forums: Posting rules or something)

[dahlheim]

thanks.

like i said, i did a lot of coding years ago (late 80's, early 90's, c, c-shell, awk and postscript).  it was commercial coding but i was the only game in town, nobody deciding anything but me.  i still meddle but obviously the technology sure has changed.  anyway, my thought was to try to accomplish the task myself, so your comments about how open-source development forums work could ultimately help.  as chewi pointed out, my search prior to posting seems to have been pretty anemic, and simply coming up with a script to manipulate some of my own pics and put them into the flickr slideshow by means already sorted out will accomplish my goal equally well i think.

[Matthew]

like i said, i did a lot of coding years ago (late 80's, early 90's, c, c-shell, awk and postscript).

Interestingly, LMCE is about to decide whether the next UI should be based on Flash/SWF (or not, or somehow related). If you've still got Postscript chops (and any inclination to work with it again, even as an "architectural advisor"), you might be interested in weighing in on that discussion. Even with lots of SWF/Flash experience around, there's not so many with the pure Postscript experience that underwrites much of SWF/Flash.

The difference between open-source and commercial feature request is that the developers decide for themselves if they want to take on a task. In commercial fields it's only the production manager that makes all the decisions sometimes taking finacials into account. in OSS it's more democratic, i guess.

Of course, you can try to find a developer to do the work for you and pay him. Or set a bounty for a certain feature. See the market place for that.

If you don't know how the GPL (or Pluto's "PPL") license works, you should realize that the Pluto code requires changes you make to it to be redistributed according to the license on the specific LMCE code you revised. Which is mainly that you have to make your changes public (under most conditions), but there are other restrictions (such as the requirement to release your revised code with the same license it came with, ie. GPL or PPL). Even if you pay someone else to do so, they're required to publish their changes according to the GPL/PPL they got it under. That's the essential characteristic of an Open Source project. So before you're involved in any revision of the code, check its license for your obligations under it.