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

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 03:12:02PM -0600, Elijah P Newren wrote:
> 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.

Hi, welcome to the club. :-)

> I'm hoping to have about 5 hours per week, maybe more if I can, but
> I'll shoot for 5 hours.  One possibility that looks interesting is to
> make gnome-terminal have a "tabbed terminal" similar to Mozilla's
> tabbed browsing.  I even found this link:
> http://www.gnome.org/todo/view.php3?id=40.

Urgh! We _really_ need to clean out that TODO list. Preferably, with a
blow torch. It is extremely out of touch with the current state of
things.

The terminal in GNOME 2 already has tabs in it (try shift+ctrl+T or
<context click> -> "New Tab"), so that particular project is out of
date.

For a more current list of items (large and small) that need looking at,
have a look at Michael Meeks' todo list at

        http://www.gnome.org/~michael/todo.html

> 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)?

You will want to get GNOME 2 on your system. The 2.0.2 release is coming
out in about two days and work is already underway on the 2.1.x releases
(which become GNOME 2.2 early next year). So there is very little GNOME
1.4 development still continuing.

> And, the overall question: Does anyone have some good pointers on how
> to become an effective contributor to GNOME?

Pick small- to medium-sized tasks initially. Communicate effectively
with the maintainers of the projects you are working with (usually this
means monitoring the appropriate mailing lists). Letting the right
people know of your intentions can often save time (as in this case,
where you nearly picked an already completed project) and duplicated
effort.

Don't be afraid to pick stuff that looks a bit hard from time to time,
since usually it's not as hard as it looks and nobody else necessarily
has more of a clue than you do (I don't think I've ever thanked Miguel
for mentioning that piece of advice on IRC one time).

Another thing to do if you are looking for places to start is to go to
GNOME's bugzilla, pick a bug and just fix it. Then pick another one.
Repeat. In particular, have a look at 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/product-mostfrequent.cgi (the most frequently
reported bugs) and http://bugzilla.gnome.org/gnome-2 (the currently open
GNOME 2 bugs, sorted by component). There is much joy to be had from
just fixing two or three little annoyances every week for a month or so.

I'm sure there are about a million other tips that people can offer
there. In fact, somebody was going to write a document about this some
point -- there may even be a bug for it (if not, why not, Telsa?).

Cheers,
Malcolm