Hi everyone, My current focus is to lower the barrier of entry for new C++ developers who want to hack on the codebase. The first thing a potential developer will look for is how to check out the source code from the repository. I've summarized the webpages you need to go through to reach source access on some popular FOSS projects. The number after the URL is the number of links on that page.
OpenOffice.org 1 http://www.openoffice.org/ 72 2 http://contributing.openoffice.org/index.html 45 3 http://contributing.openoffice.org/programming.html 43 4 http://development.openoffice.org/ 194 5 http://tools.openoffice.org/ 90 6 http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/get_source.html KOffice 1 http://www.koffice.org/ 130 2 http://www.koffice.org/download/ 80 3 http://www.koffice.org/download/source.php 85 4 http://developer.kde.org/source/anonsvn.html Mozilla.org 1 http://www.mozilla.org/ 40 2 http://www.mozilla.org/developer/ 73 3 http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Download_Mozilla_Source_Code 56 4 http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mozilla_Source_Code_Via_CVS Linux Kernel: 1 http://www.kernel.org/ Observations: - Our checkout page is very deep within the site. I was tempted to add a 7th chain as the enticing "Build, fix, enhance" link on development.oo.org actually links to the same page. - The number of links on development.oo.org is quite high, especially considering most of them are plain text links. It's difficult to find the proper path even if you know what to look for. - Accessing the Linux kernel from kernel.org is truly 1-Click. A major part of the links on that page are for source archives. - Maybe we can summarize that the number of C/C++ developers is inversely related to the ease of finding the source code .. :-) So what are your suggestions? How could we better funnel potential hackers to our CVS checkout page and the build page? What are your thoughts on this? Oh, and incidentally, when you finally find our repository checkout instructions, they aren't actually up to date .. Take care, Kai -- Kai Backman, Software Engineer, [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
