-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 hi all...
if any of you have ever wanted to get involved with KDE, but were afraid that jumping into the deep end of the pool (writing C++ code for CVS) was a bit too much to take as a first step ......... the project has started a "KDE Janitor" program whereby people can take on various janitorial duties that definitely help KDE, but don't (necessarily) involve coding. for instance, the KDE PIM package (which houses KAddressbook, KOrganizer, KPilot, KMail, KNode, KNotes, Kontact..) is doing a release post-3.2 but pre-KDE4 and they are starting a bunch of Janitor jobs for this release to make it a polished, professional one. the janitors will work in concert with the developers, who will be there to help and direct activities. the nice thing about the post-3.2 KDE PIM release is that you can track their progress with the stable 3.2 libraries, so you don't need a full CVS check out of KDE to help out. the types of janitorial duties include: - - Documentation Coordinator. Writing documentation involves keeping up with development versions of KOrganizer, tracking new and planned features, getting screenshots, collecting existing documentation, proof-reading and more. Most of these tasks are neither done by the documentation writer nor by the developers so a Documentation Coordinator could play an important role in improving the documentation. - - Patch Tester. We often get patches from external developers. Before releases we also have the policy to post all non-trivial changes as patch before committing them to CVS. Testing all these patches takes some time and sometimes developers don't have enough time to actually do this. People concentrating on testing patches, collecting and giving feedback would be very helpful to get rid of this bottleneck. - - Bug List Maintainer. There is a steady flow of incoming bug reports and wishes. The job of a Bug List Maintainer would be to review incoming reports, to try to reproduce the bugs, to gather missing information, to identify duplicates and to keep track of development in order to keep the bug list in sync with the actual development. - - Screenshot Maker. For the documentation and the websites we need screenshots. It's not hard to make some basic screenshots, but to completely cover a program and do this in an visually interesting and pleasing way some more effort is needed. A dedicated Screenshot Maker could make all the difference. - - Calendar Maintainer. On the KOrganizer homepage we offer some calendars for the "hot new stuff" feature of KOrganizer. These are e.g. school holidays, the KDE release plan etc. These have to be kept up-to-date. In addition to that we sometimes get external contributions which have to be reviewed and put on the homepage. There also is some data in the holiday plugin which is in need of maintenance. This job doesn't require to compile KOrganizer from CVS. All it needs is somebody spending some time on updating the calendar data if needed and communicating with people contributing calendar data. � - - License and Copyright Information Maintainer. Each source file in CVS should have a complete list of copyright holders and an appropriate license. This information isn't complete or up-to-date in all cases. Most of the information could be extracted from the CVS logs and by asking the contributors. This is an important job but costs some time, so it would be a great help if there would be somebody taking some of this work from the developers. - - Developer Documentation Maintainer. There is a lot of developer documentation which isn't written or collected in an organized way. This consists of discussions on the mailing lists, source code documentation, bits and pieces here and there. A Developer Documentation Maintainer would feel responsible to collect this information, watch the mailing lists and other sources of information and keep the developer docs up to date. This would make it easier for new developers to get into the project and would save other developers the time to look for or redundantly produce this kind of information. - - Software Tester. While the software evolves careful testing is needed to ensure that new features work and old features aren't affected by new ones. A Software Tester has to follow the development for knowing what is supposed to work, then test that this is actually the case and doesn't introduce new bugs and create bug reports if needed. Dedicated Software Testers help to ensure that our software becomes and remains stable. That's a very important task. if interested, subscribe and send an email to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list (mailman web interface at https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim) - -- Aaron J. Seigo while (!horse()); cart(); -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFADpxR1rcusafx20MRApXOAJ95xBIZyaSS5BOP4riRaFJ3/HvRFQCgoBpZ z4+4csZ0FpGQ7RPtb/x9QMQ= =iixm -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
