On Wed, 2002-10-16 at 18:10, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote: > On Wednesday 16 October 2002 14:58, deFreese, Barry wrote: > > Since my posts usually get ignored we'll see what happens with this one. > > :-) > > > > Since I don't have a great deal of money yet (When I win the lottery I > > promise to send big checks to Debian and Samba!! :-) ) what is the best way > > to contribute to the open source community? I've poked around on > > sourceforge to see if I could lend a hand but many of the projects that I > > found are probably a little over my head at this juncture. The initiative > > here is two-fold. > > > > 1) submit useful bug reports. > > 2) read existing bugs reports and offer help, suggestions, etc. Often > developers are unable to reproduce a bug and it is much harder to solve a bug > you can not see. > > 3) write tutorials, howtos, web docs, etc. Write a puff piece for freshmeat, > slashdot, etc. > > 4) join mailing lists and help out those just starting. Read what other > people say. You can learn a lot this way. > > 5) find a bug that is bothering you and try to fix it. Focus just on it. If > it is obviously too hard of a bug see if you can find a smaller one. > Alternatively try to add in a feature you are missing. Again start small. > > I always tell people on this list that a few helpful bug reports more than > pays a new user's entrance fee into Debian. Same goes for upstream software. I have to agree whole-heartedly - I've submitted a few bugs over the last while with most of the information involved in fixing the bug - a quick example being that when I installed blackhole-exim, it at first conflicted with xjokes - both had a /usr/bin/blackhole. When running Testing and Unstable, there will be hiccups arising, and if you stumble on them, checking to see if anyone else has reported it, and if not, offering your information at least gets things moving on making things work better. It is preferable to accomplish that now rather than waiting until a release freeze. -- Mark L. Kahnt, FLMI/M, ALHC, HIA, AIAA, ACS, MHP ML Kahnt New Markets Consulting Tel: (613) 531-8684 / (613) 539-0935 Email: kahnt@hosehead.dyndns.org
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