[mythtv] Starting off mythtv development

[Richard Hulme]

On 29/01/14 18:48, Tony Gould wrote:
>
> directory tree alone, so this could take a while... Best thing seems to
> be to read some documentation, and to try making a simple throw-away
> change to the 0.27 code I downloaded, and then move onto the 0.28 code
> from git...

Yep.  Start simple.  Find whichever (small!) itch you feel like 
scratching and make small tweaks.  There is a lot of code and trying to 
understand how it all fits together is hard enough.  Take it one step at 
a time and slowly but surely you should start to get a bit of an overview.

> 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. I can see there's a page on
> developing in eclipse (which I've used for simple python scripts),
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Developing_in_Eclipse_on_Linux, but I'm not
> sure whether to go down this route -- the page seems a bit out of date
> as, e.g., it refers to svn and the code is now in git. I'd welcome any
> pointers as to what development environments work for people. I've been
> using emacs as my main text editor on linux for ages now, so if trying
> to use a fully fledged IDE is a waste of time and the best thing is
> really to extend my emacs skills to use it to run gcc gdb etc, then it
> would be good to know (there's an SO thread here,
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24109/c-ide-for-linux, which has some
> comments).

My background was/is also more Windows based, although to be honest I've 
done very little Windows-specific development for years.  Although we 
use Windows at work, we aren't targetting Windows so whether I run an 
editor under Windows or Linux makes little difference.

I currently use QT Creator.  It works well enough for me.  I still find 
running a debugger under Linux (even within QT Creator) harder work than 
under Windows but then it's a luxury for me to even have the option of 
using a debugger.  It's either printf's (or the equivalent) or hard-core 
'toggle this pin and count the edges on the oscilloscope' :)

> Finally, I'm not sure what the tolerance level is on this mailing list
> for newbie questions (sorry if this is too long already). I'm guessing
> anything related to configuring the system ought to go to the users
> list, but how about all the other stuff like what does this bit of code
> do, advice on how to approach making a change, best way to debug, test,
> etc?

You can ask here or on the developer channel on IRC (#mythtv).  There's 
not always someone around so you may not get a response immediately 
(that means it can be many hours if you're unlucky).  If you can't stay 
connected on IRC to get an answer, you can always check the logs later 
(http://irc.mythtv.org/ircLog/channel/4/history).

Richard