Re: [linux-audio-user] How can a user help development?

Fabricio Rocha <rocha_fabricio@email-addr-hidden> writes:

> Hiyall! Christoph Eckert gave an interesting reply to a previous
> message of mine, in which I said I had interest in helping development
> of music/audio Free Software: "You can. Found a bug? File a bug report
> shortly but precicely describing the problem. Missing features? Write
> a feature request. One difficulty is that this needs to learn good
> bugrerports/feature requests, but it's not that difficult."
>
> Indeed. Well, this is an interesting topic. I guess that many of the Linux-audio-developers are in this list too, so I would like to ask...
>
> 1) You, developers in the LAU list, what´s your favourite way for
> receiving bug reports and suggestions for your projects? Which are
> those projects and where exactly can we offer suggestions and bug
> reports? This is not so obvious. I´ve been trying to be participative
> in Rosegarden Users list and it is a very good place for tips and
> suggestions. But I suppose (maybe wrongly) that not many apps have a
> support list as such. Also, some lists and forums are really big, and
> it sounds unlikely that the developer(s) will have time and patience
> to read everything. Some days ago I wrote a bug report for Hydrogen
> but found no place to post it in Hydrogen´s website. Had to e-mail it
> to the chief developer (sorry, can´t recall his name now), and I think
> this is also not the best thing to do.

I dunno what *real* maintainers of *really* large projects prefer, but
I am very happy with the "send me an email" approach. My projects
are far too small to warrant the extra time consumed by configuring
and maintaining some sophisticated website...
If you've got a suggestion/patch for yatm, tuneit, jack.el or midi.el
just send it my way :-)

> 2) Is there anything like a "How-To Help Developers as a User"? Or, more
> specifically, which apps/projects offer this kind of information for
> non-programmers/novice/intermediate users? Maybe a list of requests
> from the developers to the users, like "We need people to do this,
> this, this and that", with some "howto" information as such, could
> be useful. Specially because not all users are completely
> non-developers. For example, I have some knowledge in C and I can
> play with Glade for creating (documented) GTK interfaces. Some
> people are good in designing icons. And so on. But please remember
> that some stuff are way too geekish for us -- SourceForge CVS comes
> to my mind now.

You can code C, but you can not use SourceForge? This doesnt sound
very logical to me :-). CVS is one of the important parts of
"how to help as a user", since it makes it very easy for you to
create patches... Simply hack the repo until your feature works, then run
cvs diff -u >/tmp/my.diff and send the file :-)

Besides, you can track changes to the development repository of an application
very easily without having to wait for new releases...

Back to your question, SourceForge actually offers features in
its webinterface to post "Requests for help" or "Job offerings" or
how that was called. As a project maintainer, you should be able
to publicize the need for a certain type of person, and if
contributors would actually look through these, they could find
"jobs" to do.... However, I have a certain feeling that many projects
dont even remotely use this feature. I guess thats something
to do with overall project size and other factors.

-- 
CYa,
  Mario