Hacking

Hacking on Cowbell is both fun and easy! First, you should check out a development copy of Cowbell using Subversion and the following command:

svn checkout http://svn.gnome.org/svn/cowbell/trunk cowbell

Before you begin coding away, check out the coding style guide laid out in the HACKING file in the cowbell/ directory. This guide lays out the proper ways to indent lines, format statements and name variables.

Cowbell's source is laid out into three important toplevel directories, resources/, base, and gui.

The resources/ directory contains all the images and glade files. The base/ directory contains all source files that do not interact with Gtk#. And, as you would expect, the gui/ directory contains all files that control the GUI and interact with Gtk#. This separation is vital to allow for the batch-tagging mode which does not provide a graphical interface.

Now, start hacking!

Once you feel that your changes are ready for review, make a diff of the changes you've made and send them to the Cowbell mailing list. If you need any clarification or guidance in creating a diff, please do not hesitate to ask for help.

It may take some time for your patch to be reviewed, so don't despair.

Happy Hacking!