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

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sat, Sep 14, 2002 at 07:51:05AM +1000 or thereabouts, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> 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. :-)

Indeed.

> 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?).

There are several bugs, but not one for "doc needed to explain how
you might decide what to work on". Feel free to add it, Malcolm :) 
And to chain it to the overall one (see below).

The _aim_ is to get a lot of docs on single issues written.
And then to have them all linked from a jump-off page. So that
if you want to know something about bugzilla, you go straight
to that rather than wading through a 100-page "introduction to
Gnome development" which covers cvs, bugzilla, what all the 
underlying libraries are, what's currently deprecated or advocated,
and where all the mailing lists live. No one person has time to
write all of that. 

So the overall intended result is
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91873

And the current bugs that need to be closed before that can be closed are:

 id     owner                      state    summary
91863 hobbit aloss ukuu org uk      NEW  d.g.o needs more detail about CVS use
91866 brian cameron ireland sun com NEW  Needed: Developer FAQ 
91867 malcolm commsecure com au     ASSI need a doc on portability 
91870 malcolm commsecure com au     ASSI Need a list of what our funky-named 
packages are 
91871 malcolm commsecure com au     ASSI Need a profiling howto for gnome 
91873 jdub perkypants org           NEW  dotplan needs a "developers start 
here" page

 o CVS use one is almost done. I just keep finding new things that
people say "it helped me to know this.." and adding them in.
 o Portability -- Malcolm has this in hard.
 o List of funky packages is mostly done (woo!)
 o Profiling -- Malcolm said the performance one was including a lot
of that?

Developer FAQ is in planning stages. It's not going into CVS until
we have at least the right sections split into the right files,
because CVS surgery is messy (damn, something else for CVS doc)
and I don't want to keep waiting for a CVS admin to remove files
so we can start over. Once we know the sections to split things 
into, in it all goes, even if the answers aren't done yet.

So, people, if there are things you want to see covered in it, say 
so right now! I had thought I mailed the initial "here are these
bugs, help me!" call to gnome-love, but if not, I apologise. Brian 
has been waiting patiently for me to throw all the questions I have 
collected over the years and now is a good time to add more. Add them 
into bugzilla, or mail me and Brian, or just say here. (Know that I'm 
not a hacker, btw. I just save emails and IRC snippets and hope the 
people who said things were right. And then mark them up.)

Particularly, I am trying to get all the unwritten and "just
generally known by people" stuff in. That "just generally known"
stuff is only generally known if you happened to have been told
it, really, and that's ridiculous. It should be written down
and then no more than a couple of jumps from an obvious start-off
point. 

Telsa