Re: Contributing to GNOME

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-10-20 at 23:54, Fabio Gomes de Souza wrote:
> 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.

Cool. For nautilus, a good way to start is to look through bugzilla
looking for crasher bugs or other obvious problems and try to figure out
or fix them. Note however, that there are a lot of bugs in the nautilus
component of bugzilla. Some of them apply to an older version, so they
may have been fixed since then, or the way to repeat them may have
changed. Also, many reports are wish-lists or ideas that may not always
be what we want.

> 	However, my knowledge is a bit outdated.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?

Almost all work on Gnome is done on the development branch in cvs known
as HEAD. There is also a branch for the latest stable release (2.4)
which gets bugfixes only applied. However, these fixes are often
backports of fixes in HEAD, since all developers use HEAD.

For the details about patches etc, read the HACKING file in the nautilus
source tree.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a lonely skateboarding farmboy on a search for his missing sister. She's 
a foxy cat-loving lawyer with a knack for trouble. They fight crime!