Gilles had me promise to write a follow up to a post of his, and since I don’t want him to call me a liar, here goes.
The Gnome Team (of which I’m officially a member, but I guess it’s mostly honorary these days) is looking for fresh blood. Between our day jobs, the growing size of Gnome and slacking recruits (/me waves at Arun, Nirbheek and Romain :>> I’m just kidding, you guys rock!), we’re having a hell of a time making proper releases. You may not realize, but a full Gnome release is something like 60+ packages to bump, build and test.
So if you’re a Gnome user, here’s how you can help us.
First of all, the Gnome overlay. That’s where upstream’s odd-numbered releases go before we put them in portage. As of today, that’s Gnome 2.29. If you want to start helping, then grab the overlay with layman and start testing. Update the overlay every day and report bugs. First to us on IRC, then upstream if needs be.
Second way to help us, the Gnome overlay. Yeah, like #1. Except this time, you can pitch in by doing bumps as they come in. The best way to check new releases is Gnome’s ftp mailing list. You can do bumps locally and then push your changes to github or send us git-formatted patches.
Of course, come talk to us so that we can better explain how our ebuilds are supposed to work and how we do commits. Aside from me, no one has swine flu so the chances of getting sick are close to none.
Like most projects, if we like your work, we’ll gladly grant you commit privs to the overlay. That’s how Gilles and I first started.
Third way to help, bugzilla. That one’s easy. Pick a bug, help us close it. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve coding. A message telling us that you can still reproduce this bug several months after it was reported is good, forwarding bugs upstream is good, sending us a patch is good, closing a bug as a dupe of another bug is good, any help is good.
The big problem we (Gnome team) have with bugzilla is that we just have too many bugs and we just can’t keep up.
So any help with the “easy” bugs means the other Gnomers can spend time on the harder bugs.
If you want to help or if you have any questions, come see us on #gentoo-desktop on FreeNode.
Cheers
Hi Remi,
I’m working in the quizzes to join the gentoo dev team and help Denis Dupeyron (my mentor) with the sci-electronics stuff.
Probably I’ll be able to help the gnome team in some way.
Best regards.
Rémi: sure thing, come talk to us on IRC, we’re a friendly bunch 🙂
I tried to be part of the team several times, I made lot of bumps, testing and even some patches on the past but never had the chance to push them to the official overlay 🙁
Currently I’m far away from home (no gentoo machine, no IRC, poor connection) but will try to start working/testing/joking again soon.
Rémi: Indeed, you’ve helped a lot 🙂 hope to see you soon!
I’m seriously considering becoming ARCH=”~amd64″ so I can help test stuff like this.
I checked out the repo but I found very little 2.29. Did it get pulled?