Thursday, March 10, 2011

where to start to help with development

hi!

this is a small guide for people that want to start helping us in emesene 2.

the idea of this guide is to start with small tasks until you feel confident with the code base.

first read the description of the project here:

http://emesene.org/docs/

then read PEP8, the python coding style guide we follow: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

then install pylint on your computer and all the tools needed to code (a text editor, git etc.)

the configure your editor to replace tabs to 4 spaces, this is important.

then you can do two things:

  • go to the issue tracker and look for an easy ticket, and try to fix it
  • start running pylint on modules and fixing the warnings and error that appears*
if you have any doubt you can subscribe to the developers mailing list here: http://lists.emesene.org/listinfo.cgi

when you start developing you should create a github account, fork emesene/emesene from here https://github.com/emesene/emesene make the changes and make a pull request.

if you want to be ordered you could create a branch for each improvement, do a pull request of that branch and when accepted, merge the branch to master.

this is not needed but if you want to improve your git skills this workflow can help you

I hope this helps, if you have any doubt post a comment, I will update this post if some questions are useful for all.

* pylint reports some errors that are not in fact errors, you will learn to recognize them after some time.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi,

I was very interested by contributing to emesene, but I was lost in the code and was looking for a simple guide like this to start.

Thanks to you and to all emesene's team :)

Forgnet said...

I think I will check out this project as soon my workload in school gets lower.

I hope I may contribute with some code to the project as I want to get involved with OSS-project for practice.

I love emesene, the best IM client in linux in my opinion!