Re: hi.. every one.. suggestions to newbie..

[Andreas Ericsson <ae () op5 se>]

Manmadha leelalu wrote:
> Hi.. every one.
>
> I am a newbie in the field of opensource development.
> I wanted to get invovle myself in some opensource projects.
> because recently I started using linux and got addicted to it. so, I want to
> get involve myself in opensource projects.
> and since my favourite area is Networking and nmap is a most popular
> networking tool.
> so, I joined this community and mailing list.
>
> I have downloaded the source code.
> I will start reading the source code after a week.
> Now can any one guide me.
> what next?

That's more like "What first?".

Usually when people get involved in a project they do so because they like
a particular piece of software but, for some reason, feel they can improve
some part of it.

nmap is not a very good project to start with, 

> where to get projects to do?

www.sourceforge.net. They host somewhere in excess of 150000 opensource
projects.

> what are the requirements?

None, usually, although it helps if you know how to work with version control
systems, such as CVS, SVN, git and hg. CVS is a dying beast, so don't bother
learning everything about it. SVN will likely follow suit in 5 or so years.
They're both used widely enough that it's worth know how to check out code
with them though. Learning how to use diff (unified diff format is king on
mailing lists) and patch (to apply those diffs) is a good idea too.

If you want to help writing programs you basically just need to find some
area of code where you think you can improve things and hack up a patch
for that area. You can either create new features or you can refactor
existing ones. If your refactoring doesn't obviously make the code cleaner
and easier to read you'd better be ready to back up your changes with a
bunch of benchmarks, as nobody likes modifications to something that
already works.

If you think your programming skills aren't really up to the task, you can
always become a doc writer. Any half-decent project maintainer is secretly
in love with his favourite doc writer, because excellent programmers rarely
make excellent doc writers, but excellent docs makes more people use the
program to its full extent, thus adding to the "community cred" of said
project maintainer.

> or bugs?

There are tons of them. sourceforge.net is probably hosting around 2 million
bugs (that's a low count), spread somewhat evenly across all the lines of
code in the various projects there.

> pls.. some one tell me the idea how to proceed.

1. Find a project of your choice, preferrably one with a public bugtracker (I
don't think nmap has one, except this mailing list and its archives).

2. Sift through the bugs until you find something you think sounds easy enough to
fix.

3. Make the necessary changes and submit a patch back to the project.

Rinse and repeat 2 and 3 until you're a co-developer on said project.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson () op5 se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

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