community involvement todo?

[Werner Almesberger]

Stefan Schmidt wrote:
> We already had some thoughts about such 'junior tasks'. I really like
> the idea to give interested people small tasks for a quick start.

Regarding quick starts, perhaps some sort of tutorial could be useful,
e.g.

- how to get the basic development/run-time environment
- how to set up QEMU
- how to add/change things to/in the run-time environment
- step-by-step description for building a graphical "hello world"
  application (code layout, widgets, build process, packaging)
- pointers to reference code for the most important widgets and/or
  use of infrastructure interfaces

> The real problem is to identify such tasks. Most of the stuff is still
> much work in progress. We should start such a list anyway. :)

One problem is also that many "small" tasks involve a lot of
context. So it's two weeks of learning, five minutes of coding, and
even then you probably don't do it quite right. Of course, once the
learning curve is mastered, things improve significantly.

An example for an a bit "meatier" project, without too many
dependencies may be the implementation of a working prototype of
the "finger splash" input method: http://www.micropp.se/openmoko/

An example for a project with lots of cross-dependencies would
be a cleanup of the u-boot build process. It would be great if
the build process was "non-verbose" by default, like we have it
for the Linux kernel. If anyone wants to tackle this, the best
starting point would be u-boot upstream (and synchronize with
the upstream developers).

A build infrastructure idea: it would be great if BitBake would
support entire quilt patchsets, e.g., by pointing to the series
file. (Stefan, see yesterday's discussion on #openmoko-devel.)

> I would vote against another ml. We already have enough. Just send the
> patch to the ml for the stuff you are hacking on: u-boot, kernel,
> application...

For reasonably self-contained small projects, we also have
projects.openmoko.org

- Werner

-- 
  _________________________________________________________________________
 / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina     werner at almesberger.net /
/_http://www.almesberger.net/____________________________________________/