[mythtv] Starting off mythtv development

[Raymond Wagner]

On 1/29/2014 12:48 PM, Tony Gould wrote:
> I'd like to start thinking about contributing to the project, so I'm
> wondering as to how I might start off.

If you've got no itches of your own to scratch, you can always look for 
some low hanging fruit on the wishlist and trac.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Feature_Wishlist
http://code.mythtv.org/trac/report/2

> I
> could try having a look through the code also, but there seem to be
> upwards of 2500 files and a million lines of code in the mythtv
> directory tree alone, so this could take a while...

Understand that a lot of the code is in include externals, which we 
rarely touch, or themes and translations, that are not code. The last 
time I checked, MythTV's actual code base was somewhere closer to half a 
million lines of code, of course that's still very daunting.

> Another thing is that my development background is C++ on Windows.
> Although I used *nix back in the early 90s, and I'm vaguely familiar
> with makefiles etc, things have moved on.

The vast majority of changes to makefiles you can expect to make are 
just adding or removing items from a list of files. Most things will 
just happen automatically. Just follow the standard configure/make/make 
install.

> I'd welcome any
> pointers as to what development environments work for people.

Personally, my development environment is just a bunch of open gvim 
windows and a couple browser tabs open to Qt reference pages.

> I'm not sure what the tolerance level is on this mailing list
> for newbie questions

If you're actually looking to contribute, and contribute something 
reasonable (not wanting to replace FFmpeg with Gstreamer, or rewrite the 
whole thing in Perl), the tolerance level is extremely high.