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

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

Mostly I second what Shaun wrote. I also thought of a couple of extra
items as I was reading his reply.

On Sun, 2003-12-07 at 09:22, Shaun McCance wrote:
[...] 
> On Sat, 2003-12-06 at 04:18, Peter Crackenberg wrote:
[...]
> > 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.

Two things to add here: The GNOME C++ bindings project (headed up by
Murray Cummings) always seen keen to get help. They are in the progress
of providing idiomatic C++-style interfaces to all of the main GNOME
libraries, rather than having C++ programmers include the C headers
directly and work with those. So that might be a place to apply your C++
knowledge (and also give you a gentle introduction to the internals of
GNOME code). Have a look at http://www.gtkmm.org/mailinglist.shtml for
the mailing lists for this project.

Similarly, the GNOME Python project is humming along nicely. The Python
bindings for GNOME are already fairly comprehensive, but there are
always niggling little bugs that need to be diagnosed, confirmed and
possibly fixed. You may want to spend some time reading over the
archives of http://www.daa.com.au/mailman/listinfo/pygtk to see if that
interests you (and certainly have a look at
http://www.async.com.br/faq/pygtk/index.py?req=index to get a leg up on
using GNOME and Python).

[...good stuff about getting started snipped...]

> > 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.

There are a lot of non-coders writing documentation and reading over
documentation making sure it makes sense, etc. I would second Shaun's
comment here: it is very receptible to newcomers who are genuinely
interested in contributing.

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

Another very friendly group, too.

Based on the skillset you mentioned in your post, you may also wish to
look at the website side of GNOME. The
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-web-list mailing list is
periodically very active and overflowing with ideas. So that might be
another list worth monitoring to see what little (or big) jobs come
along.

Cheers,
Malcolm