Starting with open-source programming

Michael Uplawski · 03-07-2020, 04:13 AM

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Originally Posted by wpeckham

If you want to engage an existing project instead of starting your own: obtain the code, read the licensing, examine what has come before, look for where you can add value, and submit code modifications to the group for evaluation.

And talking to the community or the one developer who appears to front it, before you commit anything, might be a good idea, too.

Actually directing the question about where to start towards the project that you are interested in, would have been my own choice... had been (did the same for organic farming and suddenly find myself on top of a hill, looking down at 1300 pears and a few hundred apple-trees, a nice little lake, lots of forest and pastures... more apple-trees. No. Really! Communication is all. Talk to the people you want to cooperate with anyway!)

wpeckham · 03-07-2020, 05:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dugan

You worked on Maximus? Whoa congratulations. That was the only BBS software that would perform decently on OS/2.

It did better (and more with less) than most on DOS under DesQview as well. I ran three node ANP BBS under ANP BBS INC. (a not for profit corp.) for education and communication in north central North Dakota. I had tried MANY BBS systems, MAXIMUS blew them all away. The software, updated and with a driver for telnet connections, is available today and still makes a pretty great BBS. (Legend Of the Red Dragon still really rocks, and works faster over internet on modern hardware than it ever did over 1200 baud modem connections!)

But we digress.

The point was that Open Source predated the terms, and FAR predated the licensing and tools we use today.
Coding and freedom are key, passion and purpose matter, and the tools are far less important.

Mackyboy123 · 03-07-2020, 10:14 AM

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Massive projects like Mozilla and Chromium are harder to get started with, but I would suggest starting by choosing a project you would be happy to contribute to, and look at its bug-tracker. Find some otherwise unanswered bugs and try to reproduce the reported problem, and post your results (e.g., "I get the same problem as the OP with version x.y of the program", or "I couldn't reproduce the reported problem with version x.y, here is what happened instead..."). This doesn't require you to be familiar with the code. As a next step, for bugs you can reproduce, you could try looking at the code and/or run the program under a debugger to see why the problem happens (if you succeed in this, it's worth posting it on the bug-tracker too). Finally, you could think about how to fix it, write it up, and post a patch/pull request (this last "post a patch" step is where knowing git (or whichever version control system the project happens to use) helps).

I understand this, but my real question now is: what open-source python programs are good for people completely new to open-source?

boughtonp · 03-07-2020, 10:36 AM

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Originally Posted by Mackyboy123

my real question now is: what open-source python programs are good for people completely new to open-source?

Here's a list of around thirty projects:
https://github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beginners#python

You can also use the issue labels in that list to do cross-repo searching, for example:
Search GitHub for open issues with label "good first issue" and language python

The significant downside is that this is only looking at GitHub - there are a lot of projects not on GitHub, and also plenty migrating away since Microsoft took it over - but it might still be a convenient place to begin.

ntubski · 03-07-2020, 01:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mackyboy123

I understand this, but my real question now is: what open-source python programs are good for people completely new to open-source?

I don't think it really matters, as long you're interested in what the program does.