[gnome-love] Starting to get involved. Some first ideas...

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

As a continuation of the threads from previous days, here are a couple
of ideas about where to look for projects to begin tackling...

(1) In this mail
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-love/2003-November/msg00034.html,
Murray Cumming mentioned that one of the keywords we use in bugzilla is
'easy-fix'. The meaning should be obvious. Have a look at the
automatically generated report that Murray pointed to:

        http://bugzilla.gnome.org/gnome-25-report.html

and pick a bug or two to fix. Don't all start with 'nautilus'; feel free
to pick and choose. Note that fixing these bugs will require you to
probably work with the code from CVS so that your patches are against
something recent. Which brings me to...

(2) Become familiar with the way we work. If you are not comfortable
with CVS, now is the time to start experimenting. Don't worry, you can't
break anything. Have a read of 

        http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html
        
as a reasonable starting point.

For people who have some programming skill already (or are looking to
develop it) and want to become more familiar with the GNOME
technologies, have a look at the GTK+ tutorial and the GNOME 2 articles
mentioned on this page

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

In the context of gnome-love, hopefully you can use these as reference
material to look at when you are looking through existing code trying to
work out what it does.

Also, be aware that most GNOME libraries have API documentation. It is
available online here

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

Bookmark that page. You will use it a lot.

(3) One easy way to become familiar with the GNOME applications is to go
through a serious number of bugs for an application. After a while you
will start to see patterns and sometimes you can come up with a two line
fix that will fix a few bugs all at once (I was once involved in a
semi-famous incident where a couple of us fixed about four actual bugs
and were able to close nearly 400 bug reports. Of course, that was more
a sign of a neglected application than of our particular bug-fixing
skill, but it was pretty cool at the time once we started to see the
patterns in the reports).

If you are going to go through the bugs, it is often helpful to have a
few people around who have done it before. So participate in Bug Day.
Bryan Clark made an announcement here about Bug Day (which is on
Thursday USA time -- a few hours later in the week for people in more
reasonable time zones). See here

        http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-love/2003-November/msg00034.html

Before participating, read the excellent bug triage guide:

        http://developer.gnome.org/projects/bugsquad/triage/

for some ideas on how to approach it.

I have sent out a few feelers to various maintainers to see if they have
organised lists of things to do. Possibly in the near future they will
post something here (Shaun! Are you listening?) to add to this. As I
think of other things, I will throw them into the pot.

Cheers,
Malcolm