Re: [directory-discuss] Introducing Myself: Willing to Help with the Free Software Directory

[sudoman]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 10:19:58AM +0300, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:14:11 -0400
> address@hidden wrote:
 
> > In the
> > meantime, you can take a look here:
> > 
> > http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:Workflow
> > 
> > That covers stuff that you may be able to figure out on your own.
> > Licensing is the difficult part to work on, but you can leave that
> > blank. (There may be a license type called "Needs verification" or
> > something that you can use.)
> > 
> 
> OK, I will.

Shlomi, what kind of work are you interested in? Here are some of the
options: fixing SMW bugs, adding new entries to the directory, updating
version info and descriptions/data for existing entries, adding
directory features, license checking and adding, trisquel package name
matching, and probably more I can't remember.

If you want to fix bugs or add features, you'll have to learn SMW code,
and be careful not to make mistakes that cause an error to be inserted
into every directory entry. To avoid that problem, the FSF had a test
server to try out changes to the directory. If you want to work on this,
they might bring it back up for that purpose.

Checking licenses is an important task. It involves using grep to figure
out the license header on source files, and checking any license notes
on project sites or documentation. If there are minor issues, like
missing headers on a few files, or other minor non-compliance problems,
then that's ok, if the author is trying to do the right thing. If the
problem is more serious, then we shouldn't add that program to the
directory until it is resolved. In either case, it's nice to let the
author(s) know so they can fix the error.

The easiest task is to add/change entries to the directory. If you want,
licensing can be a part of this job too. Otherwise, mark unkown licenses
as 'None yet'.

Lastly, there is an important task for the brave. The FSF would like for
someone to generate a text file that matches directory entries to
trisquel source package names. This will have a large impact, since the
directory could then pull updated version info from the trisquel
repositories into entries automatically. The problem is that there are a
lot of packages to go through, and names will not always match. Human
verification will be necessary, but that part can be split up between
many people. If someone could use some sort of heuristic matching to get
both project and source package names correllated, that would be a great
start.

Feel free to think this over and poke around a bit. If you don't find
the documentation on the website to be sufficient, please flag me down
so I can improve the weaker areas.

Thanks!
-Andrew