Help out with Dia (was Re: Minor dia build error?)

[Andrew Ferrier <andrew junk new-destiny co uk>]

On 2002-06-23 at 16:26 +0200, Hans Breuer wrote:

> A look at the mailing list should show that Dia currently has
> _massive_ changes. If you don't plan to help on this it
> probably would be better to not use the cvs version for the
> next few days ...

OK, this bug has been taken care of by Cyrille now anyway, but
this does raise a point I've been wanting to mention...

I find myself relatively rich in free time at the moment, and
I'd like to help out with Dia. I'm not sure of the best way to
go about this and I was wondering if one of the maintainers or
more mature project members could suggest something.

Basically, I'm reasonably skilled in C/C++. I'm as good at
using and administrating *nix as the next guy, but don't have
much programming experience under it (this is really what I
want to learn).  In particular, I know next to nothing about
X/Tk/any other graphics/windowing kit. I'm an ickle bit
familiar with Makefiles, but not really the whole GNU
autoconf/automake thing (I'd like to learn more about this
too). My graphics and web skills are not bad.

I know this isn't a lot to go on, but could someone suggest a
part of Dia that could do with some work, and fulfills the
following (possibly contradictory and unhelpful) objectives:

1. Doesn't conflict with anything else anyone is doing for a
while.

2. Is small enough for me to complete fairly rapidly.

3. Would be useful but is not critical to the project progress
(would hate to hold anything up as it will be a learning
process for me and progress will be patchy --- no pun
intended).

4. Doesn't have too many toolkits/languages I would have to
learn all at once.

I'd like to trying working on something like that, and submit a
patch at the end (have to figure out how to use patch too --- I
know I'm missing a lot of knowledge here but I've just left
Imperial College with a Master's Computing degree and I'm a
fast learner (sorry about that bit of boasting there but I'm so
glad to be free of uni. at last! Woohoo! Real world here I
come! Or something...)

Anyway, any advice on the above would be greatly appreciated
and I'll try to repay Dia with some quality time :)

Regards,
Andrew.

-- 
Andrew Ferrier

email: andrew junk new-destiny co uk
web:   http://www.new-destiny.co.uk/andrew/