Re: [gnome-love] SW Developer want to contribute. How to start?

[Robin Sonefors <ozamosi flukkost nu>]

Hello

On lör, 2010-09-18 at 22:20 +0200, Carsten Petersen wrote:
> I am a sw developer with app. 40 year professional experience. I'm
> just
> retired from my latest job. But I still want to do some sw.
> development.
> E.g. to contribute to the Gnome project.
> But I have absolutely none experience in Gnome development! I would
> like to
> learn, eg. a new language Python.
>
> [..]
>
> But where do I start?

Did you find the http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove page? Especially the
headline "Giving love to projects" contains a few suggestions.

> Which programming environment do I need?
> I know MS Visual Studio very well as a professional programmer.
> At home I use both Eclipse and Netbeans ides.

A lot of GNOME programmers seems to prefer just using a simple text
editor.

For C/C++, there's Anjuta, and for C#, there's MonoDevelop. Both of them
also supports other languages to some extent - Anjuta seem to list
Python.

However, most projects are built with hand-written autoconf/automake
systems, so you probably won't get the kind of integrated workflow you'd
get with the IDE:s you listed.

> Please give me some advices.
> Can you propose a minor project, I can start with. And how to start.

I cannot suggest a better approach than listed in the wiki page above:
either first find a project, and introduce yourself to that project
directly, or go look for bugs with the gnome love keyword and see if
there's anything that's interesting.

Personally, I first did gnome love bugs, until I'd found a project I
wanted to continue contributing to.