Getting started with Gramps development
Warning : this tutorial is work under progress. Feel free to help and modify it
Introduction
This tutorial aims to help you in your first hacking of GRAMPS. It will help you setting up a development environment and explain where to find the files you need.
This tutorial assumes that you are using GNU/Linux (but it might help under another OS) and that you know the basics of Python programming language.
Set up your environment
Optional : set up a development environment
I highly recommend that you do not use your usual environment for developing GRAMPS. Doing so may result in data loss in your GRAMPS database ! If you run your development version of GRAMPS as you usual user, it will access to your usual GRAMPS database and a bug may result in losing productive data. Here are some options you may choose to prevent this. If you have enough resources, I recommend using VirtualBox.
VirtualBox
[[1]] is an opensource virtualisation solution. Install it, run it and you have a virtual PC in your PC. Network connection works out of the box without extra configuration needed. Install your favourite Linux distribution and start hacking GRAMPS in a fully separated environment.
chroot
You may also use a chroot to result in a similar separation as virtualbox. If you use a chroot for developping GRAMPS, please add informations here.
another user
You may also simply do you development as another user, so you won't access to your usual ~/.gramps database when testing.
Get the source tree
To get the source tree, you will need SVN. Please have a look at the dedicated tutorial Brief introduction to SVN