Can I join in the Pidgin development project?

[Mark Doliner]

Well right now we have a fixed list of people who can check in code, so you'll
have to have someone review your patch and commit it on your behalf.

We do have some ideals that we tend to follow, and we're pretty picky about a
lot of things, so don't feel bad if someone asks you to modify your patch. 
You'll learn as you go, but in general please try to make your code similar to
the surrounding code.  So, use the same indentation, same variable naming
conventions, same paradigms, etc.  Please be careful about memory leaks and
memory corruption (valgrind is a fantastic tool for detecting these).  And
please add comments explaining the logically flow through your code.

In the open source world you never know who will be looking at your code next,
so it's important that the code be very straightforward and easy to
understand, otherwise when the next guy comes along he might scrap your code
and write his own implementation, which isn't incredibly efficient :-)

Good luck!
-Mark

On Thu, 26 Jul 2007 10:31:37 -0400, Xifeng Fang wrote
> Hi Mark
> Excellent
> I have several years of industrial c++ experience and am quite 
> intersted in c# these days. I will start by bugfixing. Any rules for 
> checking in codes?
> 
> Thanks a lot
> Xifeng
> 
> On 7/26/07, Mark Doliner <thekingant at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Absolutely!  There are no formal requirements to join in and
> > contribute.  We
> > barely even have a formal group of developers.  Some of us have more
> > influence
> > on the project than others of us, but we're just a bunch of people who
> > help
> > out where we can.
> >
> > Depending on your skill set there are various tasks you can do.  Arguably
> > the
> > most beneficial thing for you to do is to look through the bugs at
> > http://developer.pidgin.im/query , find one that interests you and write a
> > patch to fix it.  If you're not a programmer then you probably won't be
> > able
> > to write a patch, but you can still comments on bugs.  It's also useful to
> > have people try to reproduce things.  Sometimes you'll have to ask for
> > additional information from the bug reporter in order to do this.
> >
> > When contributing to Pidgin it is generally a good idea to be subscribed
> > to
> > this mailing list.  You may also find it beneficial to idle in the #pidgin
> > chat room on irc.freenode.net and the Jabber/XMPP chat room
> > devel at conference.pidgin.im (this one tends to have more discussion by the
> > core
> > developers, and less noise).
> >
> > We appreciate your interest in the project!
> >
> > -Mark
> 
> On Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:56:58 -0400, Xifeng Fang wrote
> > Hi
> > I am pretty interested in Pidgin project.
> > Can I join in and contribute to this project?
> >
> > thanks a lot
> > Xifeng