[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: first post



[cc: to you, don't know if you read the list.  But please don't cc: me when 
you answer, thanks.]

On Wednesday 01 December 2004 06.35, Marcus McDuffie wrote:
>   I have an idea, tell me what you think. It would be a project called
> DMC – or “Debian Management Console.” 

Have you looked at the archive of this mailing list? This has been under 
discussion on and off for the past few moths.

Also, Recently here and on debian-devel, a Debian port of YaST (which, 
afaict, does a lot of what you propose already) is being discussed.

Have you looked at webmin? It does most of what you're looking for - it's 
not a gtk2 interface, but depending on how that is written it might be 
possible to separate out the frontend part from the backend part and write 
webmin/gtk2 (now that's so obvious I'm certain it has already been 
discussed.)

> I am not a developer, and I have no knowledge of programing. I just
> think that this would be a cool project and would be willing to help in
> any way I could.

What probably would be helpful is if you could first read through the old 
discussions, look at the existing solutions, look at what arguments pro and 
contra were made and summarize this.  Yes, it's certainly more work than 
just having an idea and writing it down, but you wanted to do work, not?

> P.S – is there a clearing house anywhere that pairs up developers
> looking to start new projects with people that have ideas? if their
> isn't their should be.

I'm guessing here, but all developers who deserve the name have already more 
than enough ideas what they could develop next.  Most people I've seen 
asking 'I want to help but I have no idea where' disappear again quite 
quickly - solving a hairy problem that is not your own is bad for your 
motivation.


And, of course, as always: if you want to help Debian, there's a lot of 
places:
 - Translations
 - testing the installer
 - go through the bug database, look at old bugs and try to reproduce them. 
If you can, fix them.

If you're interested in computers, become a programmer.  take google, find a 
nice tutorial on programming, start playing around.  If you've written web 
pages before, have a look at PHP or similar web programming languages, that 
may be an interesting way to start programming because you can actually do 
useful things quite quickly - and once you've understood PHP, you should 
have not problem with Perl, Python, ruby and most other scripting 
languages.  To C/C++ is a bigger step, but in the end, there's not that 
much difference from Perl to C - it's still a very typical programming 
language.

It's all not that difficult, it just takes quite a bit of time to learn. But 
once you've mastered a few programming languages, you'll be able to 
actually implement all those ideas you're having.


greetings
-- vbi




-- 
TODO: apt-get install signify

Attachment: pgp4jsnHBpHxo.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Reply to: