Re: Helping with FOSS dev

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Martyn Pike writes:
> Hi.  I am thinking about contributing some effort to FOSS projects.  I
> would like to focus on GPS, PolyORB, GtkAda and XMLAda.  I have a
> spare laptop that I can do this work on an I'm competent with Linux (
> I will probably use CentOS or XUbuntu).
>
> I know about libre.adacore.com and I can download sources etc.  I am
> interested in the rest of the developer community and I assume
> some/most of them watch this group.
>
> Any pointers on what to look out for that a newbie FOSS dev on those
> projects needs to know ?

My personal opinion is: watch out for duplication of effort.

There is a lot of redundancy in the current offering of free libraries
(e.g. multiple container libraries, multiple datatabase libraries,
multiple GUI libraries, etc.).  Most of them are the pet project of a
single person; if that person loses interest, the project dies.  So my
first advice would be: start a new project from scratch only as a last
resort; you should first try to join an existing project or revive a
dead one.

Also there are several packaging "meta-projects": GNU Ada on
SourceForge[1], Debian packaging[2], Gentoo[3] and now FreeBSD,
DragonflyBSD and NetBSD[4] packaging.  Contributing to the proper
packaging of existing software into these distributions is very useful,
too; the downside is that most of the work is with Makefiles instead of
Ada sources most of the time.  Note that there exists no such project
for CentOS or XUbuntu at the moment (except insofar as XUbuntu
redistributes the Debian packages), so these should probably not be your
first choices of distro.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuada
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-ada/
[3] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/prog_lang/ada/index.xml
[4] http://www.dragonlace.net/

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.