Re: [gnome-love] New Set of Fingers Seeking Direction

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your interest.  We can always use more contributors.

On Sat, 2003-12-06 at 04:18, Peter Crackenberg wrote:
> Hi Gnomers,
>
> My name is Peter Crackenberg, I'm currently a student, and I have been 
> interested as of late in the Open Source movement. As I've changed 
> distributions, display managers, text editors, what have you, the one 
> program that has really been nice for me to use is GNOME.
>
> Because of this, I thought I should put my money where my mouth is and 
> start helping the project that I like and use.
>
> My problem is where to start. As I look at the project list, nothing 
> really stuck out at me. I have experience in several languages (Java, 
> C++, Python, PHP) and experience with HTML and CSS, but no experience in 
> platform specific development, and no specific experience with designing 
> for the GNOME environment.

Well, if you want to start hacking on GNOME, you'll probably need to
learn C.  Since you already know C++, just take out classes and function
templates and anything else you find useful.

The real learning curve will be with learning the platform.  GTK+ has
its own object system, and it's used a lot throughout the entire GNOME
development platform.  A good way to learn the basics is by reading
Havoc Pennington's "GTK+/Gnome Application Development".  You can read
it online here:

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/GGAD/

The book is rather out of date, but a lot of the concepts are the same,
so it's still a good read.  We have API references here:

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of high-level developer documentation. 
This is something I've been meaning to work on for a while, but I just
haven't had the time.

The best way to learn is to start contributing to something.  The best
projects are those with an active maintainer, who's willing to help new
contributors understand the code.  Also, you'll find it's easiest to get
into projects with a reasonably small and simiple code base.

I'm biased, but I think Yelp (the GNOME help browser) would be perfect.

> The Documentation project sounded like something I would be interested 
> in, but I don't really have experience with the GNOME environment, so I 
> am not sure I am confident with writing documentation for it. I also 
> thought that QA would be something I could do, but I don't know how 
> rigorous I would be testing software.

The Documentation Project always welcomes new contributors.  Even if you
don't write documentation, it needs QA as much as applications do.

The Bugsquad is also a great way to get involved.  Every Thursday is Bug
Day, where people get together and cleanse our overworked bugzilla.

> Could perhaps some more experienced people on the list speak to the 
> projects for new recruits, and perhaps offer some suggestions as to 
> where to go?

Subscribing to a few mailings lists is a good way to stay on top of
things.  Many of use hang in IRC on irc.gnome.org.  There's a general
#gnome channel.  The documentation people are in #docs, and the bug
hunters hang on in #bugs.

--
Shaun