Michael Sullivan <michael@espersunited.com> posted
1167505335.16795.39.camel@camille.espersunited.com, excerpted below, on
Sat, 30 Dec 2006 13:02:15 -0600:
> Now I do just about anything to avoid boredom. I'd like to help out; I
> love working with code. I'm not sure how qualified I am to work on
> large projects; I know the basics of C/C++ and Java, and I've worked a
> little bit with perl and python. What would you suggest I use to
> further educate myself to be of more use to the community?
There are all sorts of projects out there. I'll briefly discuss both the
Gentoo approach and something a bit more general.
First the general. One of the best ways to find a small project to get
involved with is to pick a distribution (of course, we're partial to
Gentoo here, but it can be any of them), install it, and find a particular
package you are interested in that seems to be pretty small. Most
distributions list the package home page for all their packages, so after
picking a few, have a look around their home pages and find a project that
fits your skills and interests, sign up for their mailing lists, lurk a
bit to get a feel for things or ask around, and go from there.
If you are already interested in Gentoo as a distribution and would like
to do more, the general suggestion is to start with the handbook and
ebuild (5) manpage, and then as you work with Gentoo, find and file bugs,
supplying patches with them if you can. As you advance, there's the
developer's manual and the project pages for each project. You'll
likely find some more interesting and matching your resources than
others. If you want more to do, there's a whole bugzilla's load of bugs
out there you can look at and see about patching as well. Notably, the
first Saturday of every month is Bug Day, with a lot of folks both devs
and users pitch in and try to fix as many bugs as possible. There's a
preselected bug list, generally sorted on difficulty skillset needed, to
make it easy. The question of how one becomes a Gentoo dev is usually
answered: "By making yourself so helpful fixing bugs and the like that
existing devs can't miss you, and decide you'd be an asset to their
project."
As wit other projects in the free and open source software community, many
Gentoo projects have their own mailing list and/or IRC channel as well,
and as you find what interests you, you can subscribe as desired.
Even if you don't feel like you're up to C/C++, there are all sorts of
needs both with Gentoo and with individual projects in general. Nearly
all projects can use help with documentation and localization (language
translation), and on their user mailing lists and/or forums. Gentoo is
certainly no exception. If users can answer questions, that leaves the
devs more time to code! =8^)
All of these are free, learn as you go, for the most part. All the
software you need and most of the documentation is free for the download!
All you need is a computer to work with and an Internet connection... and
the time and will to learn and to help others. =8^)
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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