Re: [gnome-love] Guidance for a newbie?

[Alan Horkan <horkana tcd ie>]

On Fri, 13 Sep 2002, Elijah P Newren wrote:

> Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2002 15:12:02 -0600 (MDT)
> From: Elijah P Newren <newren math utah edu>
> To: gnome-love gnome org
> Subject: [gnome-love] Guidance for a newbie?
>
> Hi,
>
> I've recently decided to spend some spare time and donate back to
> Free/Open Source software since I've gotten so much out of it.  I
> thought GNOME would be a good place to start, though I'm not sure what
> part of GNOME to start on.

Read this
http://www106.pair.com/rhp/hacking.html

and start on something you like

most projects have plenty of feature requests and bug reports
http://bugzilla.gnome.org
if you ask most developers are generally willing to recommend interesting
tasks suited to your ability and interests, but first you need to pick a
project you like and ask.

that multiterminal has been done
http://multignometerm.sourceforge.net/

avoid starting new projects, have a good look at sourceforge.net and
freshmeat.net to find existing projects, ideally work on software that you
like and use regularly that way you can "Eat your own dogfood".  Tell us
what you like and we can probably suggest and existing project

http://abisource.com/information/news/2002/awn108.phtml#target2
Abiword has soom tasks suggested for new developers called POW, Project of
the Week, and Abiword has its own bugzilla full of feature requests and
bug reports.  http://bugzilla.abisource.com

If you like mandrake, you might check out mandrake cooker ...

I had a really long reply but managed to cut and paste it out of
existance, doh! so i will leave it at that.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
Dublin, Ireland

http://abisource.com
http://gnome.org/gnome-office/

"Code? I am just here for moral support" - me, just now.

> I'm still a linux newbie, but I have been programming for a number of
> years.  Mostly I've used C/C++, but I have some *basic* familiarity
> with other languages (pascal, x86 assembly, matlab, fortran, perl,
> Tcl/Tk, and even scheme).  Since most of my programming was
> self-taught, I'm highly ignorant of tools and skills used in group
> projects (though I tend to know the names of some, such as CVS).  I'm
> also sure that I have large holes in my programming knowledge that
> formal training or a more focused learning method may have covered
> better.  I would like to learn, though...


> http://www.gnome.org/todo/view.php3?id=40.  However, I know that I
> personally tend to drop large projects without good motivation unless
> I first get some successes behind me on smaller tasks that are
> similar.  So I don't want to take on the tabbed terminal project if
> it's going to take me too long (say a month or so to at least get an
> alpha version).  But I really can't tell how long that project would
> take.
>
> So, I guess I have multiple questions: What are some simple tasks that
> I might be able to do, just to get some accomplishments under my belt?
> Will I first need to have GNOME2 on my system (I'm planning on
> upgrading to Mandrake 9 soon)?  Anyone have some *wild* guesses on how
> long the "tabbed terminal" project might take?  And, the overall
> question: Does anyone have some good pointers on how to become an
> effective contributor to GNOME?
>
> Thanks,
> Elijah
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Elijah Newren
> Internet: http://www.math.utah.edu/~newren   newren math utah edu
> Tired of pop-up webpages when surfing the internet?  Look at
>    http://www.math.utah.edu/~newren/noPopUps.html
> for how to get rid of them without spending a penny.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>
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