On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, Gazal, Geraud (MED) wrote:

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As I really appreciate the tool you're developping, I'd really like to contribute, as soon as my home internet connection is up again.

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Ah, cool, welcome aboard. :-)

Yeah, will subscribe to inkscape devel/user as soon as possible (damned internet provider)

Note that there's also a news feed available via gmane.org, if mail is an issue.

OK, there we are. I really want to help this project as it really helps me. Here are the tasks on which I can help :

• writing test plan (it used to be my job a few years ago)

I've been (slowly) working on exploring some different aspects for testing Inkscape, and would love to work with you on this. So far our testing has been organic as opposed to systematic; planned testing likely could help identify issues more intently.

• translation : my English is not perfect (and my accent is terrible/fic),

but I'got some good dictionaries. I'm native French speaker (this can explain the accent), correct in Spanish and German, poor in Slovak and Czech (but my girlfriend is native :) ).

Translators are always welcome. :-) I think we've got people involved in all those languages, but the translations may benefit from additional sets of eyes.

• doing some tests

This is definitely needed; I can give lots of tips and ideas on testing. We don't have much in the way of unit tests, but I've been finding a number of other effective approaches to doing it.

• working on specifications (my current job : project coordination)

An immediate area we need help here is with the extensions system. It's been on our roadmap to write a spec for this, and some work has been done and many of the ideas are out there, but it needs to be written up and pushed to completion.

The reason why extensions would benefit from a spec whereas most other features haven't needed one, is because by definition the system needs to be used by a lot of different developers coming at it from a lot of different ways (different programming languages, operating systems, etc.) So specifically detailing the API, capabilities and limitations, etc. etc. will be vital for making it successful.

• providing some example svg (mostly technical/mapmaking oriented, not

artiscal value) / screenshots

Also definitely check out www.openclipart.org, one of Inkscape's sister projects; technical symbols and examples are quite welcome there.

• work on some small tutorials
• test test test

I fact, here is my proposal :

• begin working on a list of specifications in order to get a traceability

matrix for test/user manual/tutorial/screenshots. (see example below attached as rtf doc). Maybe to be posted on your wiki someday

• will try to do the same for RFEs in order to sort/orgize them (sounds

huge)

By the way, note that I did this too, back when we were all part of Sodipodi. What I came up with is here:

http://www.sodipodi.com/index.php3?section=development/tasks

I believe rejon ported these writeups into the RFE tracker, so you hopefully should find some good order in the older RFE's.

For what it's worth, I think for the RFE what we need is not so much organizing them, but more about identifying ones that are completed or duplicates, or that need further elaboration. Also, to date we've focused more intently on the bug list than the rfe list, although hopefully this will shift towards rfes a little more in the future.

Note that one area of testing that can be directly beneficial is to try to replicate some of the reported bugs (esp. the ones with comments "I can't recreate it"), and provide additional info like back traces, error messages, etc.

• begin working on some test documents
• start a 'Need for contribution' wiki page listing points where

coders/artists/dummies_like_me can help

Looking forward to seeing this. :-)

Wainting for your feedback and if this souds good to you, please forward to the devel-mail-list

Definitely sounds good, and am forwarding.

Thanks, Bryce