Nmap Development mailing list archives
Re: Contribute to N-MAP
From: Fyodor <fyodor () nmap org>
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2016 13:56:14 -0800
On Sun, Dec 4, 2016 at 4:31 AM, Gyanendra Mishra <anomaly.the () gmail com> wrote:
A lot of students will be asking the same question as you. I decided to write a blog post to answer the question.[1] It's currently in a draft like state. I would love your suggestions to improve the post. Gyani [1]https://gyani.net/blog/getting-started-with-nmap/
Hi Gyani. Nice post! I'm glad you're able to share your experience with Nmap development, etc. Here are a few little notes I took while reading it: If you are reading this post while thinking of trying for GSoC 2017
remember that GSoC is a beginner-intermediate program and is not for experts. If you are an expert then you are better of being a mentor.
That's a reasonable perspective although I've seen GSoC work out great for advanced students too. Some prefer being a student to a mentor because students get paid and also generally do more of the hands-on engineering rather than managing/mentoring. Also, while some organizations are different, mentoring is such a large responsibility that the Nmap Project usually only takes mentors that we already know and with substantial Nmap development experience. So even someone with expert-level skills might be better off starting with Nmap as a student. Nmap doesn’t have the standard Contributing to Nmap page that most open
source programs have on their websites.
I guess that's fair. We do have the HACKING file, but it's not so comprehensive and I see you do link it later in your article. If you or someone wants to create a SecWiki page on contributing to Nmap, that would be great! And then we could change the HACKING file to just link to it. I wanted to work on the hacking and not the UI so Zenmap wasn’t an option
for me.
It is good to have your perspective although this does make it sound a bit like UI work is lesser than core Nmap or NSE. But I've actually found Zenmap UI work to be among the hardest parts of Nmap to do well. It takes a unique mix of good design skills and thinking about the use cases and of course also being able to implement them well in code. After all, Zenmap has a lot of complex functionality well beyond just running Nmap and presenting the plain results in a window like the lame UI's of some other software. This is something that one should learn. You don’t have to contribute code
to contribute to open source. There are many different ways to contribute open source,
Excellent point! Also, where you point to the nmap-dev and nmap-announce lists later, you might consider making those links so they're easier for people to find. Anyway, thanks for writing this good article! Cheers, Fyodor
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Current thread:
- Contribute to N-MAP Rudransh Tyagi (Dec 03)
- Re: Contribute to N-MAP Jacek Wielemborek (Dec 04)
- Re: Contribute to N-MAP Gyanendra Mishra (Dec 04)
- Re: Contribute to N-MAP Fyodor (Dec 15)
- Re: Contribute to N-MAP Gyanendra Mishra (Dec 16)
- Re: Contribute to N-MAP Gyanendra Mishra (Dec 04)
- Re: Contribute to N-MAP Jacek Wielemborek (Dec 04)