On Jan 13, 2008 11:59 PM, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> wrote:

On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 11:33:13PM -0700, Timothy Yau wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a 3rd year computing science student and I would like to help out with
> your project because I think it's really cool, and your 'project of the
> month' page seems to suggest that newcomers are welcome. I've never worked
> on an open source project before; could someone please tell me how I can get
> started? Maybe I could try to do some small bug fixes. Thanks.

Hi Timothy,

Great to hear of your interest! There's a lot of different ways to get
involved, depending on your skills and interests. Generally what we
suggest is to look around and find something that draws your attention.
Maybe a feature that just "doesn't quite work right", a bug that looks
easy to fix, or a great idea you have kicking around.

A number of people choose to get involved by working on extension
scripts in Python. Others who are more comfortable working directly in
C/C++ might just jump right into the code directly. Some people who
look for less technical ways of contributing do so by writing
documentation, making translations, triaging bugs, and so on.

http://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape is a great place to browse both for
bugs needing attention, and for features that people have suggested.
Some people just browse through the list looking for bugs that sound
doable, and attempt fixing them; once they have a fix they can upload a
patch for it to the bug tracker.

Good luck, and let us know - either here, or on IRC or Jabber - if you
have questions!

Bryce