On Feb 23, 2007, at 19:14, Mark Dymek wrote:
Hi i would like to become a Developer/Contributer to macports how do i get started? In other words how do i find out which projects are not being done by someone or should i just look over the current projects and see one i like or should i just submit my own thing to you guys and see if you like it and want to include it? I know you are still transferring over from darwinports but i can't seem to find any documentation on either of the two sites that gives specific instructions to people who want to become part of the team. Any help would be appreciated thanks a lot.
If you would like to write new portfiles or update existing ones, you can do so locally, then submit a patch to a new ticket in Trac. Then send a message to this list with the ticket URL and a committer will evaluate the ticket and hopefully commit the change. Portfiles are written in a language called tcl, but it's not hard to learn, and the easiest way is probably to just look at some of the existing portfiles to see how they do things. You can also help by looking through the open tickets, seeing which don't have patches already, and writing and attaching the patches, then informing the list which tickets you've done this for. Even finding open tickets that already have patches, that just haven't been committed yet, and alerting the list about these can be helpful. If you can first try the patch out locally and verify that it fixes whatever the issue is, that's even better. You can find ports that are abandoned by looking for the maintainer set to nomaintainer@macports.org, like this: $ port echo maintainer:nomaintainer@macports.org I currently see over a thousand unmaintained ports. If you see one in the list that you would like to maintain, you can alert the list or a committer and we can make you the maintainer. Then you can submit updates to the port as above, and other users of that port will know to contact you when they have questions or requests. Commit access can be granted to people who have made several positive contributions. Generally you should be the maintainer of several ports already before you request commit access. If you would like to develop the core MacPorts code, you can make local changes and submit a patch to a new ticket in Trac, just like with the ports, and then one of the core MacPorts code developers can review your changes. I'm not sure if there's a current roadmap of desired future changes at this point. If there is, that would be the place to look for ideas for contributions.