The following is a proposal for a series of talks for the upcoming Tel Aviv Perl Mongers meetings.
Contributing to an open source (Perl) project (documentation, code, bugs and other things) In a recent poll conducted by Elizabeth Naramore people were asked why they don't contribute to open source projects? The 3 most common answers were *) I don't have enough time *) Not sure where or how to contribute *) I'm not confident enough in my own skills http://naramore.net/blog/why-people-don-t-contribute-to-os-projects-and-what-we-can-do-about-it (Ran, thanks for the link) In the presentations we'll try to overcome all 3 of the problems or at least to lay down the foundations for this process. Before helping people to contribute to Open Source projects probably we'll need to answer the question Why? ----------- Why to contribute? =============== Yes, really why? How to contribute? ============== Originally I thought to have a single talk but as I was writing down the items I need to talk about I see it is growing well beyond a single talk. Hence I propose it to be a series of presentations. The plan is that each presentation can be useful on its own and that each presentation should give the audience the tools to start doing something. Both people who are relatively new to Perl and people who have more experience in Perl but no experience in contributing to open source projects. Some of the items I thought about: - Picking a project While most of the talk is generic some aspects are more Perl specific. For example when trying to get involved in a project one of the first things you need to do is actually to look for an interesting project. This can be almost automatic - pick a project you already use - or this can be a more involved process: looking at various projects and trying to find something interesting. As we are mostly interested in Perl based projects I'd recommend looking at modules on CPAN http://search.cpan.org/ including full-blown applications http://padre.perlide.org/ (hint hint) or looking at other Perl based applications listed on http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?applications (if you don't find your favorite application there, please add it to the list. It is a wiki after all). - communicating with other developers - mailing list - IRC - web forum ??? - Wiki ??? - Documentation For most of the applications helping with the documentation requires a similar amount of communication and setup as it would be for coding. On CPAN it is easier. You can create an account on AnnoCPAN http://www.annocpan.org/ and start adding examples and documentation. - bug tracking systems RT GitHub Trac Bugzilla - Opening accounts - Reporting bug - Bug triage - Version control system - SVN - Git + GitHub - there are others but they are less frequently used (e.g. CVS, Mercurial, Bazaar) - Creating and submitting a patch (documentation or code) - Creating and submitting a unit test - Build systems ExtUtils::MakeMaker Module::Build Module::Install Dist::Zilla - How to find low hanging fruits? This section will be about locating items in open source projects that less experienced people can also help resolving but in order to explain what is a "low hanging fruit" let me go back to my question earlier: Why to contribute? I think my aim in this set of presentations isn't to convince people it is worth their time to contribute. It is to find the "low hanging fruit" who already would like to contribute but has some other obstacles. People who already know - that they can improve their own skill a lot by contributing - that it is a lot of joy to see the fruits of our labor to make other people happy. - People who already see the value in being active part of this community. - People who just want to "give back" something after they received so much from other open source developers. - People who would like to work on things they really enjoy - and not only on things they get paid for. Probably there are other items. I am just thinking aloud what might be interesting and needed in such a series of presentations? What do you think? Gabor -- Gabor Szabo http://szabgab.com/ ps. let me also refer you (again) to the document Shlomi wrote about the subject http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/How_to_start_contributing_to_or_using_Open_Source_Software _______________________________________________ Perl mailing list [email protected] http://mail.perl.org.il/mailman/listinfo/perl
