On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 10:42:25PM +0100, José Fonseca wrote: > I don't think that we should frustrate the potential new developers > expecations with janitorial tasks. > > I'm of the opinion that if one can code then one should do it. The > janitorial tasks should be taken by users that want to aliviate the > developers load so that they code more. > > I think that the two most rewarding things that a potential developer can > do is enhance the documentation and/or bugfixing. Both these tasks > contribute to quickly generate the required know-how to start working on > missing features. They give you better understanding of the architecture > and the code. > > I can be more specific: > * Documentation: > - update the existing documents > - change the code comments to Doxygen so that we can automatically > generate reference manuals of the subsystems and the drivers. > - add more items to the Developers' FAQ > * Bugfixing: > - Basically pick a bug on the card of one's choice and hunt it down!
Actually, if there was a list of janitorial tasks somewhere, it'd provide a very convenient point to start working on the code . . . There's a /lot/ of code in the DRI system, and a lot of it is very hard for a newcomer to follow (the cpp generated function names in large parts of the drm code, for example - "why doesn't grep show this function that turned up in the debug output??"). Janitorial stuff, or any basic code cleanup, would give people something simple enough to wrap their hands around, but not so complex/deep that they /have/ to understand all the code before they can do anything. Documentation fixes, by the way, /are/ janitorial stuff, unless they're changes to reflect major reworking of the interfaces. And, particularly at this stage, bugfixing /isn't/ - you need something way beyond a newcomer's understanding of the code to fix the kind of bugs that turn up in the tcl branch, for example. I think just having a list of things that a newcomer could look at, work on, and quite reasonably expect to have patches accepted, would be an excellent thing. Nothing will get people involved more quickly than having their patches, however trivial, in the code. Simon -- PGP public key Id 0x144A991C, or ftp://bg77.anu.edu.au/pub/himi/himi.asc (crappy) Homepage: http://bg77.anu.edu.au doe #237 (see http://www.lemuria.org/DeCSS) My DeCSS mirror: ftp://bg77.anu.edu.au/pub/mirrors/css/
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