{"id":349,"date":"2007-03-25T20:47:27","date_gmt":"2007-03-26T02:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.codedread.com\/archives\/2007\/03\/25\/ink-on-my-fingers\/"},"modified":"2007-03-25T20:47:27","modified_gmt":"2007-03-26T02:47:27","slug":"ink-on-my-fingers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/03\/25\/ink-on-my-fingers\/","title":{"rendered":"Ink On My Fingers"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think Mike Shaver<\/a> said it best when he stated (in a podcast here<\/a>) that an Open Source project should do its best to let willing contributors get in and get out quickly. As a busy father, husband, home owner, and engineer - I don't have a lot of time to contribute to open source projects, so when I do have some<\/em> time, I'd like my efforts to count. Ideally, it's best if I can find a bug to fix that will directly impact the user experience (as opposed to changing some software plumbing underneath that doesn't have any immediate user impact). In other words, as a part time contributor with not a lot of time to invest, I want my efforts to have some immediate visible benefit.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, it's best to pick bugs (at least initially) that don't require full-scale immersions into software architectures to figure out the root of the problem. This would<\/del>will likely change if<\/del>as more time is spent working with such projects.<\/p>\n

I just spent a half hour or so fixing a couple minor errors in the Basic tutorial in Inkscape<\/a>. I had some back-and-forth conversations with MenTaLguY<\/a> and Bryce<\/a> on IRC and mailing lists earlier in the week where I learned that the tutorials, while deployed as SVG<\/a>, are actually stored as DocBook<\/a> format in the SVN<\/a> repository. So here's how I did things using my OpenSUSE 10.2 box.<\/p>\n