Re: Hello && About Maintainership of Gtranslator

[philip chimento gmail com]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2017, 02:54 Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 11:27:25PM +0300, Muhammet Kara wrote:

> In the meantime, I committed a few patches to the current master and the
> gtranslator-2-91 branches (thanks to Alexandre Franke for the reviews on
> bugzilla). And I have also submitted a few more patches to bugzilla.[1][2]
> (Reviews are most appreciated. :))
>
> I have been a local GNOME advocate, and a translator so far. And I would
> love to continue my GNOME journey also as a developer.
>
> Any help and directions are appreciated.

If you don't have a computer science background, it'll be more difficult
for you to work alone on gtranslator. Although it is entirely possible
to learn programming oneself, I think the state of gtranslator will
first get worse, then once you've gained more experience it'll improve.

For GLib/GTK+, I've started writing this guide:
https://people.gnome.org/~swilmet/glib-gtk-book/

You can also ask to previous gtranslator maintainers what they think
(e.g. Ignacio Casal Quinteiro, nacho on IRC).

Hi,
It's wonderful that we have someone willing to step up, show up, and do the work on Gtranslator. Thank you Muhammet!

I don't think "you'll make it worse if you don't have a computer science background" is a good response. Maintainership is a scarce resource and we should do everything we can to encourage people to take it up, and help improve their skills by working with them, rather than discouraging them. Also, I'm an experienced maintainer and I don't have a computer science background; just experience.

That said, Muhammet, if you don't have a lot of experience programming yet, then something that might help you is to look for a co-maintainer to learn from, or maybe even just someone(s) willing to do code review regularly on your patches. I'm a big believer in teaching and learning through code review, and it has certainly helped me avoid mistakes many times. Or talk to previous maintainers as Sebastien suggests.

Regards,
Philip C