Contributing to Voyager
As you can see this book is far away from being complete. Also,
there is not that much source code available yet for Voyager so we
need any support we can get to go on with this project. This project
is a big undertaking and it will need months of work before we will
get first results. But every project starts out small and if we do
not try it, we will never know if we can succeed with it.
It is important that people start supporting Voyager right from
the beginning. After all we design Voyager not just for us, but also
for you. This part of the book will show you how
you can contribute to Voyager.
Developers
Probably the best case right now for Voyager would be if you
are a developer that likes the idea and wants to contribute. If
this is the case for you, welcome on board! As you could see
Voyager consists of quite some parts, some of them are more, some
less defined so far. It doesn't matter on which part you want
to work, we are open to any contributions. Note that some parts
already have a lead developer and we might be quite picky about
technical details. So we hope we can have some positive discussions
and later also contributions from your side.
It is not just coding that needs help from developers, right
now there are many open questions and maybe you have a lot of know
how about kernel design. So you could for example contribute to the
kernel chapter in this book to make sure that we get more details
in there. It is up to you, feel free to contact us on any of the
ways mentioned here.
Please introduce yourself quickly when you join IRC or the
mailing-list. Don't give up if no one gives an answer right
away, we live in different timezones and we have daytime jobs, so
it is not always easy to find the time needed for an answer.
IRC
Some of the core developers of Voyager are online in IRC on
a regular base, you will find us in the
#netlabs channel on
irc.netlabs.org. You will get a list of other servers
when you connect to it.
Mailing-lists/Newsgroups
netlabs.org provides mailing-lists as well, there is a
specific Voyager mailinglist called
voyager-dev@netlabs.org. To subscribe to it send
an email to
voyager-dev-subscribe@netlabs.org, you will get
a confirmation email shortly afterwards.
If you do not like mailing-lists you can use a web/news
(nntp) interace as well. This is provided by gmane.org, a
mail-to-news and vice versa gateway. The Voyager mailinglist can
be found here:
Getting the Source
Souce code of Voyager is managed in a Subversion repository
at netlabs.org. We also provide TRAC for managing the projects.
You can get more information about that at
.
Please check this page as well for instructions about
Subversion. The structure of the Voyager repository is a bit
complex, the most recent information about how to get it can be
found in TRAC as well.
Users
Users can contribute to Voyager right now as well. While
there is nothing to test yet and probably won't be for the
next months, it is important that people know Voyager right from
the beginning. As mentioned in this book, there seems to be a big
confusion among users about what Voyager is, or will be. Also, many
people think that netlabs.org will now stop developing for eCS and
OS/2. Again, this is absolutely not the case and you can help us if
you talk to users about that and explain the idea of Voyager. The
worst thing that could happen would be when the already small OS/2
and eCS community splitted up into two parts. So help us doing
Voyager advocacy but also listen to the arguments and fears of
people who do not understand or like the idea of Voyager yet. It is
important that we take them seriously and try to show them that
their arguments are not valid. Even sceptical people might come up
with great ideas we did not think of. If this is the case, let us
know. See about how to get in touch
with us.
There are a few more things you can do for Voyager:
Present Voyager to your local usergroup, distribute this
book to people, and show presentations available at
netlabs.org. The Developers Workshop presentation is also
available as Ogg-file so you could listen to it to get some
more details.
Correct the text in this book. Most authors right now are
not native English speakers so it might sound a bit rough. See
for more information about
that.
CUA (FIXME)
Try to bring Voyager into the news, write articles about
it if you have contacts. We need to attract more people and
getting news coverage might help a lot about that.
Try to find sponsors for Voyager, see
.
Help us translating Voyager, see
.
Translators
Explain where to get the strings to translate, explain how
one can get Subversion commiter for a language, etc.
It is a bit too early for that, will be described as soon as
it is ready.
Sponsoring/Fund Raising
As you can imagine, Voyager is a very big project. So far all
programmers working on Voyager do this for free in their
spare-time. While this works for quite some open source project, it
is also a fact that almost all big successful projects do have
fulltime programmers working on them. The benefit is quite obvious:
There is a difference if one can workon a project 8 hours a day, 5
days a week or just a few hours a week or in best case a few hours
a day. Projects like OpenOffice.org, Mozilla but also Gnome and KDE
do have fulltime programmers.
netlabs.org already hires developers, on project or permanent
base. So far the development was payed with sponsoring from users
and companies, and if there was not enough money, the founder of
netlabs.org, Adrian Gschwend, payed the difference on his own.
During the last three years Adrian Gschwend invested around
20'000 Euro of his very own money into netlabs.org.
While this was ok for the last three years he has to change
that now. netlabs.org should get self-supporting.