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Contributing to Xfce

Purpose of this document

At the time of writing (FOSDEM 2013), the entry barrier for contributing to Xfce is substantially higher than it could be. There are several hurdles that people have to figure out themselves. Our aim should be to help them out with easy to find information that makes obvious how interested people can start contributing to Xfce.

The two main hurdles (probably) are:

  • There is no easily accessible list of low-hanging fruit or tasks to get started with.
  • There is no defined, transparent contribution process.

These hurdles make it difficult for potential contributors to know how they can contribute and what they could contribute in the first place.

The purpose of this document is to come up with a concept for providing low-hanging fruit to the developer community and a contribution process that removes uncertainty about what the right way/format of contributing code is. This document is only about contributing code since other areas, like translations, are already well documented.

Present State

Documentation on Contributing

The Get Involved page on the Xfce website has no information about contributing code at all. There is documentation describing the contribution process. Possible tasks to work on are scattered across various areas of the Xfce wiki. Unless you know the wiki inside-out, you'll have a hard time finding these pages:

The Design SIG is an initiative that Xfce developers and designers use to collaborate on improving the user experience of Xfce in general. It's been quite successful in the last 1-2 years. However, the majority of Design SIG topics are complex and thus not necessarily useful for people looking to start contributing to Xfce.

The two wish lists are, unfortunately, rarely used by developers, if at all, so their usefulness is questionable.

Current Contribution Process