Nmap Development mailing list archives
Re: Contribute to N-MAP
From: Gyanendra Mishra <anomaly.the () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2016 20:29:21 +0530
Hi Fyodor, Great insights! I have made a few changes to incorporate your notes. On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 3:26 AM, Fyodor <fyodor () nmap org> wrote:
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 2017remember 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.
I understand your point! I think I wrote the above point thinking of not to scare away the people new to open source. A lot of my juniors in University are pretty scared when they start and think starting contribution requires god like skills. I was wrong in leaving out people with expertise though. I see how general expertise doesn't qualify you as a mentor and how you are better off starting as a student. I have made suitable edits to the article.
Nmap doesn’t have the standard Contributing to Nmap page that most opensource 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.
Maybe Nmap.org can have a link to the SecWiki Article whenever one gets written. A lot of projects have a link on the main site, it makes it easier to access for new people I guess.
I wanted to work on the hacking and not the UI so Zenmap wasn’t an optionfor 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.
I think this came off wrong because of the two meanings associated with the word hacking. By hacking I meant writing exploits/detection scripts relating to the meaning 'gaining unauthorized access to data in a system or computer' and not 'an appropriate application of ingenuity’(software development). I've made some edits to clear the confusion that resulted with me using the word hacking.
This is something that one should learn. You don’t have to contribute codeto contribute to open source. There are many different ways to contribute open source,Excellent point!
Thank You!
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.
I have made the change.
Anyway, thanks for writing this good article! Cheers, Fyodor
Happy holidays :) Cheers, Gyani
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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)