[fedora-india] Hi all

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 3:47 AM, Aniket Suryavanshi <kietans at gmail.com> wrote:
> I guess we guys have to learn technologies from the LAMP stack to get
> started contributing for the Fedora community.

No. That is one of the most incorrect assumptions a lot of people have
about FOSS contribution, let alone Fedora. FOSS != LAMP. You can
contribute code to FOSS in any language you have learnt in college. If
you know C/C++ you have access to a huge number of projects that you
can contribute to within Fedora. If you're willing to learn Python,
your horizons extend even further. You will have to do a lot of
reading, lot of studying, not for marks but to just understand what
exactly is going on. It will be way more reading than what you may
have done in your entire college life.

And the key to contributing code is first reading it. A majority of
potential contributors run away scared at the perceived complexity of
the code because they have not done anything more than the pascals
triangle in college. It can take weeks of toiling to understand code
of a reasonably complex program in any language. You will not be able
to submit uber hacker style patches in the first go. Your first
attempts will probably be spelling mistakes, typos, etc. Most of your
initial patches will be ridiculed. The key is to not give up and keep
working because with every such criticism, you learn.

A good place to start looking at code is with Bugzapping. See this:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers

You get to see program bugs first hand. Download the srpm, try to
reproduce them and then try to fix them. If someone has already
provided a patch then read it and understand how it fixes the issue.
It is quite a slow process and you have to be willing to put in the
hours.

-- 
Siddhesh Poyarekar
http://siddhesh.in