Loooking to contribute

UCSDrake · 2009-08-12 14:32:23

Hey everybody,

I searched around but haven't really found any pages or posts for this so here it goes.

I'm currently in a computer engineering program at a post secondary school, and am looking to contribute to Arch Linux, now I know my programming skills aren't as sharp as some others here (something that I'm working on) but I'm not quite at the point where I can look at source code and make improvments. Is there any other way I can help out and contribute to the project? Biggest thing for me is; I want to learn. Any thoughts or ideas?

Thanks!

rson451 · 2009-08-12 14:40:49

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mutualism_Arch

UCSDrake · 2009-08-12 14:45:50

ah thanks, apparently I didn't see that part of the wiki

next up on the doccet, reading absolutatly everything on wiki I suppose

Allan · 2009-08-12 14:48:50

rson451 wrote:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mutualism_Arch

That pages is rather horrid... I'd say definitely a candidate for improvement. But it does cover most things that are needed.

The question usually comes down to what area you feel comfortable helping out in. I suggest the bug tracker as a great place to start.

If you want to learn more coding, the pacman tracker has many low priority tasks that are not the hardest to implement. Ask on the pacman-dev list if you want help. It can be a bit daunting at the start though.

But solving general bugs is always very useful. See if you can replicate a bug - it may be solved with a past software update or might only affect a certain configuration. Then search (google?) for a solution. Chances are that upstream or another distro has run into the same issue and posted a fix. Test the fix and if it works, update the PKGBUILD and post it. It is surprising the number of skills that you pick up while doing this.

majiq · 2009-08-12 18:34:44

I would also suggest learning bash or other shell languages, since you can help out a lot of people on forums and channels, and fix bugs and learn about what's happening in many scripts by virtue of knowing bash. It's not too hard, but has plenty of random tricks to learn to aid you to proficiency.

UCSDrake · 2009-08-13 15:58:26

Allan wrote:

If you want to learn more coding, the pacman tracker has many low priority tasks that are not the hardest to implement. Ask on the pacman-dev list if you want help. It can be a bit daunting at the start though.
But solving general bugs is always very useful. See if you can replicate a bug - it may be solved with a past software update or might only affect a certain configuration. Then search (google?) for a solution. Chances are that upstream or another distro has run into the same issue and posted a fix. Test the fix and if it works, update the PKGBUILD and post it. It is surprising the number of skills that you pick up while doing this.

I'll definitely give this a try, any debuggers you suggest for linux? I've used netbeans in the past but that was for java applications.

majiq wrote:

I would also suggest learning bash or other shell languages, since you can help out a lot of people on forums and channels, and fix bugs and learn about what's happening in many scripts by virtue of knowing bash. It's not too hard, but has plenty of random tricks to learn to aid you to proficiency.

any places you suggest to start learning bash or shell languages?

I'll of course start by googling all of the above, but figure if theres a better/preferred place I'd start with that

Arch Linux

#1 2009-08-12 14:32:23

Loooking to contribute

#2 2009-08-12 14:40:49

Re: Loooking to contribute

#3 2009-08-12 14:45:50

Re: Loooking to contribute

#4 2009-08-12 14:48:50

Re: Loooking to contribute

#5 2009-08-12 18:34:44

Re: Loooking to contribute

#6 2009-08-13 15:58:26

Re: Loooking to contribute

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