How can I help?

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Hello John,

On Sun, 13 Apr 2003 17:00:23 -0700 (PDT)
John Quigley <circgroup at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Howdy Y'all,
> 
> I just joined the mailinglist and have been pouring
> over recent communications.  Now that school is
> letting up for me, I'd love to help with this
> incredible project; I'm at a loss as to where I should
> start.
> 
> I have plenty of programming experience in Visual
> Basic.  Thats about it.  No, I'm just kidding of
> course.  C, C++, Perl, etc, etc all no problem.  I'd
> also be willing to maintain the website/documentation.
> 
> In short, you've a ready soldier here, looking for
> direction!
> 

Thanks for offering your help! We will be grateful of any contribution
you can make. 

To answer your question on where to start, this is really up to you as
much as it is up to us. Anyone can contribute in the way they like best
and that best suits their skills.

This is the way I think this works in general:

First you checkout the sources from CVS and start running all
components, trying to get a feel of how the system works. 

At some point you will find something that annoys you or is obviously
missing or you think of a brilliant feature that would greatly enhance
the user experience. Then you start digging into the code to see if you
can find the part that is annoying you or what would be the best place
to add your new feature (or your documentation, or ...).

If you have an idea you want to implement or documentation you would
like to write you can either first try to implement it yourself and when
it's finished surprise us with a fully working, tested patch, thus
attaining instant stardom in the community ;-), or you can start by
stating your intention on the mailing list, asking if anyone else is
already doing it, sollicit ideas from other people, etc, before
trying to implement something.

Probably it's best to do a combination of both. For larger changes and
design issues always discuss first, for small additions or fixes
providing a patch is probably more suitable.

Anyway, during any of these stages feel free to ask questions on the
mailing list or IRC (#xfce on irc.freenode.net).

Alternatively, some modules in CVS provide a TODO file (I do in for the
panel, Edscott does for xffm, I think). You can have a look there to
find something to do, but in that case you'd better ask on the mailing
list first, since the files may very well be out of date or someone else
may be working on the features in there.

Cheers,
	Jasper