Re: Contributing

[Rett Kent <rett.kent@gmail.com>]

On 07/23/2011 01:13 AM, Sameer Rahmani wrote:
> Hi,
> My friend and i want to contribute to Emacs as much as we can. We want
> to contribute in development and translations.
>
> I read in contributing documents that is better to post here first,
> where should we start? what we can do ? and is there any specific task
> or something?

Hi Shameer,

I sent an email to Stefan Monnier a month ago or so with that same 
question.  Hopefully he won't mind if I share his response.

 >
 > Thanks for your interest in Emacs and desire to contribute.
 > We're not very well organized to answer such a question, I guess, but
 > you could start by looking at the etc/TODO file (tho it's largely
 > a dump of ideas along the lines of "it would be nice, but I'll never get
 > to it" so it may not be that easy to tackle).
 >
 > Most people start by contributing small changes they've accumulated in
 > their .emacs over the years, or bug reports (with or without patches)
 > about problems (actual bugs, or just missing features) they've bump
 > into.  Other things you could try is to go through the etc/NEWS file in
 > the trunk branch and look at the entries that are not yet marked as
 > "done" (i.e. either a --- or a +++ before it) which means that the
 > corresponding change has not yet been reflected in the manual.
 >
 > I'd also recommend to follow the emacs-devel@gnu.org mailing list,
 > although it's pretty high traffic.
 >
 >
 >         Stefan


If you do end up contributing, you should set up a website or blog that 
documents how you actually managed to select something to fix, and 
shepard it into the Emacs trunk.  I tried to start, but I found it a bit 
too daunting for my feeble abilities.