Re: Contributing to GNOME

[James Willcox <jwillcox gnome org>]

Hi Fabio, 

On Mon, 2003-10-20 at 16:54, Fabio Gomes de Souza wrote:
<snip>
> 	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.

Great!  Have you seen the nautilus snack thing that Dave posted?

http://primates.ximian.com/~dave/nautilus-snacks.html

It's aimed at people like you who want to get started hacking on
nautilus.  If you haven't done much C/gtk stuff in a while, you might
also consider warming your skills up on something a bit smaller/less
complex (nautilus is arguably one of the hardest core modules to hack).

> 
> 	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.

Awesome.  Nautilus has no lack of bugs :)

> 
> 	However, my knowledge is a bit outdated.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?
> 
> 	I want to do it, I (think I) know how to do it, but I don't know where 
> do I start. Please help me.
> 
> 	I am currently using GNOME 2.4 built from tarballs using CVSGnome. The 
> sources of each package are untouched in my hard disk. Should I start 
> working on these?

If you want to fix bugs, I suggest building 2.4 from CVS.  I use a tool
called 'jhbuild' (you can get it from CVS, module 'jhbuild').  There is
a tutorial for using cvs here:  http://www.cvshome.org/docs/blandy.html

You'll have to use the anonymous gnome cvs servers for now, since you
don't yet have an account.  There is some info on this and other general
cvs stuff at:  http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html

James