On Fri, 31 Dec 2004, Felix Rabe wrote:
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 16:27:46 +0100 From: Felix Rabe <xitnalta@...128...> To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-devel] Volunteer work and an idea how to get into existing code bases
Hi Bryce,
It's a shame that I only saw your calls for volunteer work now that you replied to them yourself... But I think this is an excellent idea to invite new developers! There needs to be more of it, or maybe it just needs to be more visible (like with a tag in the subject, eg. "[CFV]" for "Call For Volunteers").
Abiword used to organise a POW or "Project of the Week". It worked well when Abisource were starting development as there was much more work to be done then there were volunteers and they also offered a small prize for the best patch submitted that month.
It was very worthwhile but a lot of work to organise. Many of the problems were easy to fix bug that the developers could have fixed themselves but deliberately left aside to encourage new contributors. Others were suggestions to improve the plugins (usually import export plugins) and other non essential features, and Inkscape does have good seperation of plugins so a simliar approach might work well.
In fact, I was looking for an easy way to familiarize myself with existing (poorly or barely documented) code bases and came up with this (as yet sadly unimplemented) idea: Look for a bug that has been fixed sometime in CVS and get a diff for the fix.
Might be interesting to see a UML diagram of the codebase if anyone already has the tools setup to do it easily, generate it automatically (Rational Rose, Visio, Autodia?)
I think it might be another good invitation and might add value to code documentation if some good (ie. easy) fixes and enhancements were pointed out in the Wiki by the developers that commited them to CVS or by the newbies that found the diffs and found them to be straightforward.
If I someday get to implement this idea, should I start a Wiki page? (This might take a few months though...) Or is somebody else willing to do it? Or is it a not-so-god (bad) idea altogether?
If you have the enthusiasm to get it done it is definately worth trying.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Free SVG Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org Dia is for Diagrams http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Inkscape, Draw Freely http://inkscape.org Abiword is Awesome http://abisource.com