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

[Thomas Abthorpe]

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On Thursday 19 June 2008 17:57:12 Terry Poulin wrote:
> Hello,

Hi Terry

>
> 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.

Glad to see word is getting around! KDE4 is new enough to most of us, you are 
in good company.

>
> 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.

Not to diminish your enthusiasm, but if you got a pulse and body temperature, 
AND want to help, we will have you :)

>
> 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?

The short answer is yes, the long answer is subscribe to the mailing list 
(likely already done), get in the irc channel, freenode #freebsd-kde, 
consider installing a tinderbox 
http://www.freshports.org/ports-mgmt/tinderbox/, start debugging/testing! 
- From there hopefully some patches will follow!

>
>
> 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.
>

An impressive set of credentials!

>
>
> How can I best be of help?

Sync your ports tree, overlay the area51 tree, and install x11/kde4. Find 
something that is borked and fix it :)

Review the Porters Handbook, 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/, gives you 
a sense of our best practises.

Scan log files from recent builds, 
http://goodking.goodking.ca/tb/index.php?action=list_buildports&build=7-FreeBSD-area51, 
there are others out there, this one is mine.

That is a start, once you are up and running with kde4, I am sure you will 
have something specific to contribute.

>
> TerryP.

Thanks for your interest, we hope to see some patches from you real soon!


Thomas


- -- 
Thomas Abthorpe		| FreeBSD Committer
tabthorpe at FreeBSD.org	| http://people.freebsd.org/~tabthorpe
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