Contributing to GNOME

[Fabio Gomes de Souza <bugtraq gs2 com br>]

Hello friends,

	I'm Fabio Gomes from Brazil (FB on IRC) . I am a long-time GNOME 
fulltime user and lover (since those 0.9x days).
	
	As a software developer, I would like to start hacking on Nautilus. Now 
I have some spare time (some hours daily and full Sundays) and I want to 
contribute to GNOME, and Nautilus is my project of choice because I know 
it needs some work and I've heard somewhere (on IRC, maybe) that 
Nautilus has currently only two or three maintainers.

	I have some C and GTK experience, wrote some GNOME programs, including 
a panel applet (quicklaunch) and a quite decent IRC client with TCL 
scripting support which I didn't publish.

	Besides writing code, my best general skills are on troubleshooting, 
hunting and fixing bugs. I understanding sources from other people easily.

	However, my knowledge is a bit outdated. My latest programming 
experience with GNOME and GTK was in 1.4 days. Also, I have little or no 
experience with collaborative programming through patches and CVS in 
free software. I don't know, for example, how do I generate and send 
patches. Which version should I send patches for? Who/where should I 
send patches to?

	I want to do it, I (think I) know how to do it, but I don't know where 
do I start. Please help me.

	I am currently using GNOME 2.4 built from tarballs using CVSGnome. The 
sources of each package are untouched in my hard disk. Should I start 
working on these?

	Currently I have a bugzilla account (fabiofb) and have already posted 
some bugs here and there. I am also subscriber of nautilus-list, 
gnome-list and gnome-devel-list. I'm on irc.gnome.org all the time with 
the nick 'FB' on #nautilus, #gnome, #gimp #gnome-devel. I want to get 
closer to the community. Any more suggestions?

	Right now, I'm downloading lots of documentation/reference and looking 
at nautilus source.

	Nice to meet you all.

	And thanks in advance,

--
Fabio Gomes de Souza <fabio gs2 com br> (+55 81 9127-0597)

.- GS2 TECNOLOGIA DA INFORMACAO LTDA :: www.gs2.com.br
|- IT Infrastructure :: Security :: Embedded systems :: Linux
`- Olinda, Brazil - +55 81 3492-7777 - negocios gs2 com br