GNOME Commander

A powerful file manager for the GNOME desktop environment

Development

GCMD hacking

Hacking documents
Contributing
Translators
Build sources
Bugs
Mailing lists

RSS-feed for the latest changes in Git repository.

This page contains information about hacking and contributing to the GNOME Commander project. We encourage anyone who wants to contribute with code, translations, bugreporting, boil up new useful ideas, or just give some quality feedback that also is quite important. You are all welcome to sign up on our mailing lists and take part in discussions and development.

Versions

Some words about versions and version numbering.

GNOME Commander is being developed in several branches:

the master branch, where all the normal development takes place;
a stable branch, named after the current stable release, which only includes bugfixes, doc updates, translation updates, but no new features;
optionally, some feature branches, where new ideas or big features are cooked until they are ready to be merged in the master branch.

The version numbers (major, minor and micro) follows the quite usual standard of odd and even versioning, where odd minor versions stands for the unstable releases and the even numbered branch eventually gets the thoroughly tested new functions backported. Remember this when talking about GCMD or when sending patches.

To check out the latest sources from Git, following commands can be used:

The master branch:
git clone git://git.gnome.org/gnome-commander

The current stable branch:
git clone -b gcmd-1-2-8 git://git.gnome.org/gnome-commander

You can also browse the repository in your web browser.

Gentoo users can also make use of the ebuild template in our source tree.

Contributing

If you want to contribute, send in patches, translations, having some useful idea or just some feedback, good or bad, then you are welcome to contact us thrugh our mailing lists or the authors directly if you want to keep it more private.

If you're not an programmer but have some good ideas for stuff that you want to see in this program, check the TODO file first before sending email to the authors or the mailing lists.

If you want to submit a patch please do so.

Send an email with the patch to the developers or the developer list.
Please use the -u flag when generating a patch.
Include it as text together with a good explanation of what the patch does or what problem/bug it solves.
You can also do all of that directly from Git using git format-patch and git send-email.

Special note for translators:

Although GNOME Commander is currently available in over 40 languages, there are still many missing and those to improve. The current status of all project translations can be found at http://progress.gnome.org/module/gnome-commander.

For adding a new translation simply download the head potfile and rename it to LL.po (replace "LL" with your language code, see the complete list of language codes).

Here you will find the recipe on how to contribute your new or updated translation (replace "LL" with your language code, see the complete list of language codes).

Get a fresh copy of the program source (either from Git or snapshot)
Unpack it and run ./autogen.sh.
Update proper LL.po file by usual chant: CD into the po directory and run intltool-update LL.

You may find translation compedia to be quite handy as a reference. To create such a compedium from all LL GNOME translations it is required to:

wget -r -l1 -nd -A.po -b http://i18n-status.gnome.org/HEAD/LL/extras/
wget -r -l1 -nd -A.po -b http://i18n-status.gnome.org/HEAD/LL/office/
wget -r -l1 -nd -A.po -b http://i18n-status.gnome.org/HEAD/LL/fifth-toe/
msgcat -o compendium-LL.po *.po

Alternatively you can use pre-built compendia for every language available for GNOME Commander. Compendia are built from available translations of Inkscape, exiv2 and all apps found in GNOME, KDE and OpenSUSE.

Our recommended translation tools are: Poedit (http://www.poedit.org/) and gtranslator (http://gtranslator.sourceforge.net/). KBabel could also be a good tool if you also have the neccesary KDE libs installed.

All translation files (LL.po) MUST be UTF-8 and to avoid corruption by mail application please send them as gzipped or bzipped attachments.

Translators may also find the service Open-Tran.eu useful, (not only European languages). It offers an easy access to the translations of open source projects. It acts as a kind of a central Memory Translation database where you can look up a translation suggestion or submit a whole .po file to the server.

Hacking documents

Links to documents regarding GNOME Commander internals.

Internal-Viewer Internals. This document describes details of the 'intviewer' library, which implements GNOME Commander's Internal-Viewer. If you plan to hack the internal viewer, add features or just browse the source for fun, we recommend reading this document first (However, note that the source files in Git always are more updated than this document).

Building from source

Required libraries:

GTK+ (2.8.0) or above for latest version.
GnomeVFS (2.0) Used for most of the file handling.
Glib (2.6.0)
GNOME (2.0)
GnomeUI (2.4)

If you have the libraries above, and of course their sub-dependencies, devel-packages and a sane build environment, the usual "./configure make make install" procedure should work like a charm. If you are building the code checked out from Git, use ./autogen.sh instead of configure, in the Git case you also need to have the gnome-common files installed.

FAM is an optional library, it is used to monitoring file alterations, which means that when you create/delete/modify a file this program gets a message from FAM so it can update it's directory views on the fly.
Update: since 0.9.8 and on, files modified within GNOME Commander should update without FAM.

Build on FreeBSD

For our FreeBSD users here is a page describing how to build GNOME Commander on FreeBSD in order to get full functionality out of it.

Bugs

Discovered a bug?

You can report or view GNOME Commander bugs at the gnome.org Bugzilla.

Though GNOME Commander is relatively free from bugs and is a quite mature program, no programs will ever be totally bugfree. New bugs can be introduced with new features, or through other programs and libraries it depends on, this goes especially for development and testing versions. Quality bug reporting is very important and can be a very good help for the developers to make a better program. Bug reporting is not an act of dissatisfaction, so you are very welcome to help us find, hunt down and kill the bugs. Testing of new releases and bug reporting is the best way users without programming knowledge can help out in the development of a program, and those with programming knowledge are very welcome to suggest fixes and/or send patches to the developers, all in the spirit of free and open source software.

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
//Linus law.

Mailing lists

There are two mailing lists regarding GNOME Commander.

The user list is mostly for topics about using GNOME Commander, a kind of support list. The devel list is where the developers of this project are discussing topics about the development. For the moment, all posts from non members of these lists are beeing held for approval due to spam reasons, but anyone are welcome to sign up on the lists and post unmoderated. So, if you post without beeing signed up on the list, your mail will be moderated before it is sent to the list, and remember that you should make a note in the email that people should CC their replies to you if you not are on the list.

The user list: gcmd-users (gcmd-users at nongnu.org)
The developer list: gcmd-devel (gcmd-devel at nongnu.org)

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