Get Involved!
The GNUe project is almost entirely a volunteer project,
made up of a wide range of people with IT and business
skillsets, from many different countries. We are always
keen to welcome new volunteers to help out with various
project tasks, whatever level of commitment you can offer
us.
If you are new to free software projects, you might
like to read Havoc Pennington's article, Working on
Free Software, at
http://www106.pair.com/rhp/hacking.html. Not
everything in this article is
necessarily true of GNUe (for instance, we tend to use
IRC much more than
mailing lists, and can make good
use not just of coders but all kinds of people), but it's
still a good overall introduction.
Coding
The full GNUe code base can be checked out using
Anonymous CVS access. We
willingly accept patches to existing functionality, or you
can look at our
roadmaps to see what features we are planning, and volunteer
to help out with these.
All of the GNUe tools are written in python. If you
don't know python yet, don't let that put you off.
If you have experience of any other progamming language, you
will probably be able to learn python very quickly, whether you
are coming from C, C+, perl, php, or Basic...
Even if you are not a coder (or are looking for a break from
coding), there are many other ways to get involved in
GNUe.
Package Proposals
At the moment, we only have proposals for some of the GNUe
packages, and those that we do have could always do with
further input. This is an area where people with a business
background, rather than IT, can be absolutely invaluable.
CVS bug testing
All of the tools are continually being developed. Although the
core developers do alpha-testing as they go, and are active users
of the product themselves, they cannot cover all possible bases,
and active testers of CVS are therefore
encouraged.
Details of how to report bugs, via e-mail or DCL, are
here.
Pre-release testing
In the rush for a new release, pre-release candidates will be made
available for testing. Testing of these
pre-releases
is an important part of our final bug-squishing before release.
Because the pre-release testing cycle is normally a bit frantic,
the preferred way to report bugs is via
IRC.
Cross-platform testing
In both cases, we are especially keen for testers for platforms which
are under-represented among the core developers, most of whom use
Debian GNU/Linux. Testers for 'minority' platforms like RedHat
GNU/Linux, SUSe GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows (95, 98, 2000, NT,
XP) are therefore especially welcome.
Documentation patches
Spot an error in documentation?
E-mail doc-support@gnuenterprise.org.
Web site patches
Spot an error on this website? E-mail
www-support@gnuenterprise.org.
New documentation
New documentation is welcome in whatever format - we use a mixture of
plain text, Texinfo, Docbook, LaTex, or OpenOffice for documentation formats,
and will willingly convert documentation from other formats. Documentation
does not have to be large to be useful - a well-crafted, topic-specifc
HOWTO can be a very valuable addition to the community.
Or even...
If nothing else, you could hang out in IRC
and keep the core developers enthused and amused...
Copyright issues
If you are contributing significant amounts of code or
documentation, we will need
copyright assignment from you.
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