On 01/27/2011 10:43 PM, Eric Grivel wrote: > I am getting the impression that the Gimp project is trapped in a > chicken-and-egg problem with regard to attracting new contributors, > where the few core developers are too busy maintaining the product to > spend a lot of time helping new developers come on board.
To be honest, I don't recall a single instance of when a question about the code has not been answered (when developers have been around). If you are unable to get in touch with core developers on IRC, feel free to use our mailing list instead. It's just that it has to be new contributors driving the core developers, not the other way around. > Gimp is an extremely large and complex system. I am a fairly experienced > coder myself, and have recently submitted patches for two open bugs. But > those were easy ones, not really related to any Gimp structures but > basic "C" bug fixing. I have looked at some of the other outstanding > bugs and for most don't have a clue where to start, or how to make sure > that my fix fits in the vision, or that it doesn't break something else. This is exactly why I have been setting up a nightly builder and trying to get everyone to write more regression tests: to make GIMP a less scary project to work on. If people can be confident that if they break something, our nightly builder will discover that, then people wouldn't be so afraid. I believe our biggest development-technical mistake right now is that people don't write regression tests for new functionality they add. It is kind of boring and sometimes hard, but the long term effects of consistently doing this is priceless. Our nightly builder is found at http://gimptest.flamingtext.com:8012/waterfall which curiously enough failed this night to my changes yesterday, but I fixed that already... > At this point, knowing how busy the core Gimp developers are, and > recognizing that it will take more time for them to walk me through a > problem and a solution than it would take them to just fix the issue > themselves, I am hesitant to ask for a lot of help. On the other hand, > the idea of just delving in and figuring it out myself is quite daunting. Please please please don't hesitate asking for help, the worst thing that can happen is that you are ignored ;) But don't underestimate the value of being able to understand code all by yourself. It takes some practice, but that skill is generic and will make you a better programmer in general. Regards, Martin -- My GIMP Blog: http://www.chromecode.com/ "Nightly GIMP, GEGL, babl tarball builds" _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
