Re: Call for help

[Julien Cristau <jcristau@debian.org>]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 12:36:05 +0100, Sebastian Fleer wrote:

> I read the "Call for Help" by Corsac:
> http://www.corsac.net/?rub=blog&post=1461

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 11:29:45 -0500, Barry Schatz wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I read these
> http://www.corsac.net/?rub=blog&post=1459
> http://www.corsac.net/?rub=blog&post=1461
> and I understand there's a lack of people willing and able to help.
> 
Thanks to both of you for your interest!

There's currently a number of things that need doing, I'll try to list a
few.

First there's a lot of open bugs on the X packages, some of which need:
- confirmation whether they still apply.  Depending on the type of bug
  this needs to be asked to the submitter, or can be tested by anyone
- more information from the submitter
- forwarding upstream to bugs.freedesktop.org
- closing, if the submitter has been asked for input more than, say, a
  month ago and hasn't replied
That's a lot of work, but every bit helps.

Then there are new upstream releases of many of the packages (pretty
much all of the X.Org 7.5 katamari).  It's nice to update the packaging
at the same time (checking against policy updates, updating the
debian/xsfbs directory from the xsfbs git tree, ...).

The code base is huge and can be intimidating, so it's probably better
to start by defining an area of interest (a set of client apps, or a
driver for your hardware, e.g.) and look at the bugs and existing
package to get a bit more familiar with it.  You can forget about the
rest of the stack (for now ;) ).

There's some info about the team and some packaging tips linked from
http://wiki.debian.org/XStrikeForce (the git-usage part in particular
may be interesting if you're not familiar with that tool).  For the
rest, feel free to ask any questions you may have, either on this list
or on the #debian-x irc channel.

Cheers,
Julien