On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 09:00:14 -0300, Douglas De Toni said: > To start with it I think I could translate the incoming E17 to portuguese, the > programs tools and documentations.... its a lot of work but I can find some > help over here!!
Feel free - translation is something that very rarely gets done by the core coders, simply because they don't speak Portuguese or Chinese or Swedish or whatever. So volunteers who read/write the language are always appreciated. (I'd do a Latvian translation, except that although my Latvian is good enough to deal with a newspaper or a TV broadcast, my technical Latvian is non-existent. You rarely see "iconify" in the newspaper. :) > After that if my C skills grow faster and faster maybe I can get my hands in > some code ?? : ) A good way to get started on this is to find a bug, quirk, or irritating misfeature, and fix it - quite often a bug is (a) caused by an error that only affects a few lines of code (forget to initialize something, or do 2 things in the wrong order, etc), and (b) not something that the original programmer can easily duplicate for debugging. Don't worry if you find the problem and don't know how to fix it - quite often, being able to narrow it down from "The window manager suddenly dies" to one function and say "This routine does <this> wrong thing, but I'm not sure what's right here" is enough to let somebody else fix it. Just this week, I learned more than I ever wanted to about the Linux kernel's handling of ioperm() while tracking down a 2-line error in Ingo Molnar's latency patches that caused a nasty memory leak - and I suspect I'm literally the only user who runs both Ingo's patches *and* the buggy gkrellm plug-in that made the leak noticeable. So I ended up fixing 2 separate small bugs that combined to cause major issues on my laptop.. And the importance of having a small army of people finding and fixing these little 2 and 3 line errors cannot be underestimated - I suspect that there isn't any truly successful open-source project that doesn't have such an army....
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