Re: Newbie volunteer -- need some directions and help

From: F J Franklin (F.J.Franklin@sheffield.ac.uk)
Date: Sat Apr 13 2002 - 04:38:44 EDT

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    On Sat, 13 Apr 2002, Roshan Mathews wrote:
    > The problem is that I
    > have no particular area of expertise, (I thought I knew C pretty
    > well but had to revise my opinion after trying to work through
    > K&R). I am struggling through the GTK+ tutorial too.

    1. Although I was very experienced in C, I knew next to nothing about
       C++ so AbiWord has been a huge education for me.
    2. GTK+ - talk about jumping in at the deep end. Why do you want to learn
       GTK+? Just for AbiWord? or for some other project?
    3. You seem to have done documentation stuff in the past. Would you be
       interested in working on AbiWord's documentation? What languages do you
       speak?

    > So I'd like to start with someone giving me the smaller parts of
    > the code to write or something. Is this possible?

    I don't think it's possible, really. You are the only good judge of your
    abilities. One thought, however: since you do documentation work, would
    you be interested in working on DocBook import/export? There seems to be a
    lot of demand for DocBook support but none of the developers has had time
    to do it properly...

    If you are up for this, I suggest doing it as a plugin for the 1.0
    release - after AbiWord 1.0 is released the CVS sources will be changing
    rapidly and this will be very confusing for everyone. If, however, you
    develop plugins for AbiWord 1.0 you don't need to use CVS at all, just get
    the source tar ball for 1.0 and work from there :-) and all those people
    who use AbiWord 1.0 will be able to use the plugin.

    This is just an idea.

    > Seriously, I'd really like to join the project.

    It's not really a question of "joining" the project. Just get to know
    AbiWord, bit by bit, submit the occasional patch, and once it becomes
    clear that you know what you're doing then someone will give you CVS
    access etc.

    Regards, Frank

    ps. If you feel like some topical insanity, hang out on IRC :-)

    Francis James Franklin
    F.J.Franklin@shef.ac.uk

    "No, she really likes me. She told me I look like Britney Spears, and why
    would you say that to somebody you don't like?"
                                                               --- Elle Woods



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