[kde-freebsd] I wish to be of help.

[Terry Poulin]

Hello,

Heard from daemonforums.org about a message going out on ports@ asking
for helpers. I would very much like to be of service if I may... I do
however have one problem -- I'm not familiar with KDE4 or CMake.

I'm young and wet behind the ears but learn quickly. FreeBSD, OpenBSD,
Vim, and KDE are four things I love so I'm willing to put in some
effort if y'all will have me.

As soon as possible I'll start looking deeper into the available
resources online (wiki, cvs, mailing list archive, known issues, etc)
to see if I can find anything that I can do but I'll probably need
some guidance/direction on what to do eventually...Can anyone help me
find my way if I should get lost?


I have a test and gaming machine with a partition dedicated to testing
releases of FreeBSD and PC-BSD, so I can't really break much here ;-).
It's only got a Pentium D 930, 2GB of RAM, and a nVidia card but she
gets the job done quite well. It's survived several compiles of KDE
3.4.x/3.5.x in the past and I would love to see her see KDE4 someday.


About me:

I'm an American residing in the UTC-4/UTC-5 time slots depending on
DST status, speaking English and have been *trying* to learn German
on/off bit by bit in my spare time.


Since January 2006 I've used Unix like systems and practically live on
FreeBSD. I've used KDE3 a lot on FreeBSD and often enjoy poking around
the files that came with it, trying to find my way in the midst. Using
the system has never been a problem for me, and in fact has helped me
a lot being able to read the manual pages and files in /usr/src/.


I began teaching myself programming almost four years ago. Although
C++ was my first language, I much prefer using Perl and Python for
most takss. From past experiences I'm familiar enough with Qt3/Qt4 in
order to use it and read code using it. December 2007-February 2008 I
spent about a week learning Python and the rest figuring out how to
use PyQt3 through the C++ documentation in order to cover the leg
work. It was my first real use of Qt and toolkits in general but never
had serious trouble with it.


With varying levels of ability I've used: C, C++, Java, Perl, Python,
PHP, and Ruby. When it comes to document processing I use TeX/LaTeX +
Vim and I'm fluent enough in XHTML/CSS to get along fine. Since I try
to only write scripts for use with the Bourne Shell, I don't know any
bash or ksh'isms but I've got no problems with reading or editing
bourne style scripts.


I'm accustomed to using SVN, so figuring out CVS via the manuals is no
big leap for me. When I've had  questions about the ports system, I've
usaually directed it to reading the makefiles that make it go 'round.
While  I get along well enough with the BSD/GNU Make tools....  I have
no practical experience with using CMake or development experience GNU
Auto* tools, only the usual compile from source / installation
routines. I'll grab a copy of the CMake documentation when I get a
chance.



How can I best be of help?

TerryP.