Re: [Gnewsense-dev] How to get involved

[Sam Geeraerts]

Federico Gimenez Nieto schreef:
> Hi all,
>
> I am new to the distribution and want to offer my collaboration as
> programmer (or whatever :)). I have experience in web systems, some base
> knowledge in C, perl and shell and am eager to learn.
>
> Could you please point me a good place to start?
>
> Thanks a lot, cheers
> --
> Federico

Hi Federico,

Thank you for your interest in gNewSense. We can always use some more 
help, so we welcome your offer.

For a broad overview of stuff to help with, see [1].

From looking at your skill set I have the following suggestions:

* Web stuff:
- Work on PmWiki: we have some issues with it, e.g. [2]
- If you have any experience with PHP and UTF-8, see [3]

* C:
- Write replacements for the parts of the kernel we've marked as 
non-free. You said you're eager to learn, right? :P

* Perl:
- There are two script to help summarize our freedom verification 
process: [4] and [5].

* Bash:
- Builder [6] might still need some work; [7] looks like low hanging fruit.

These are just some suggestions. You can also:
- Look through our bugs to see if you can pick anything up.
- Look through our wiki.
- Monitor the users and/or dev mailing lists to see if you can fix 
anyone's annoyances.
- Fix the stuff that you are annoyed by yourself.
- Give feedback to other people.
- Learn packaging and provide missing packages (e.g. from multiverse).
- ... and so on.

If you have any doubts or further questions, don't hesitate to contact 
us on the mailing lists or on IRC. Welcome to the community.

[1] http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Main/HowToHelp
[2] http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00247
[3] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2009-02/msg00029.html
[4] http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Main/KPFVScript
[5] http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Main/KFVSummaryTableScript
[6] http://www.gnewsense.org/Builder/Builder
[7] http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00223