Re: [gnome-love] Getting started

[Sindhu S <sindhus live in>]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 3:59 PM, Michael Hasselmann <michael taschenorakel de> wrote:

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 15:23 +0530, Kashyap Murthy Salabhaktula wrote:
> Hi,
>     I am quite new to open source contribution. It seem to me that
> gnome would be a pretty nice organization to start off with, given the
> fact that it has robust documentation and diverse areas which I could
> explore. But I am having trouble to choose where to start it off. Any
> help in this regard would be helpful. I am comfortable with C/C++ and
> python.

This question comes up frequently on this mailing list and there have
been many answers in the past.

You get started by starting to do something. Anything. Writing an e-mail
and asking is good but that is not the first step at all.

I know that deep inside you behave tactical when you ask "how to do [I]
get started?" (because I heard somewhere else that this funny
open-source thingy is good for my career).

You want to know whether investing any time, any effort at all, into
open-source (which looks so stupid, right?) is worth it. That's why you
*only* wrote an e-mail. Because asking that question, sending that
e-mail, took you very little effort. Most probably none at all.

Well, that's simply the wrong question, Kashyap. Do you really think
there is a good simple answer to that? A cookie-cutter recipe? Perhaps a
well-guarded secret?

Hey Kashyap,

Ask yourself, which is my favorite application in GNOME? which application

interests me? If there is no answer then you probably haven't used GNOME

enough yet.

Once you know your favorite application, read about "Bugzilla" on wikipedia and
navigate to GNOME's Bugzilla. Again the specific links and resources are all
available through a search engine.

Find a "bug" related to the favorite application of yours.

At this point you must learn how to use "Git" software.

Now search on the internet for "GNOME newcomers tutorial".

After this preliminary ground work, you should be able to help yourself even better than any of us :)

Cheers!

P.S: I wrote a series of pages that explains *why* we are asking you learn to use Bugzilla and Git.
http://sindhus.bitbucket.org/docs/guide-to-gnome-contribution/bugs-bugzilla.html

Some instructions are Arch Linux distribution specific, you can ignore it.