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Author Topic: How can I contribute to development?  (Read 5336 times)

dmytron

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How can I contribute to development?
« on: November 25, 2014, 12:08:08 pm »
I am an amateur programmer. I don't have a deep knowledge of Delphi and Pascal so I am not sure about writing patches. My financial situation doesn't allow me to make money donations to the Lazarus. Are there other ways I can help to develop Lazarus?

typo

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Re: How can I contribute to development?
« Reply #1 on: November 25, 2014, 01:22:32 pm »
Well, sure, if you have Linux knowledge you could help on lzRichEdit.

marcov

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Re: How can I contribute to development?
« Reply #2 on: November 25, 2014, 01:25:30 pm »
Examples and documentation also always can use some extra hands. It depends a bit of where your interest and skills lie of course.

hrayon

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Re: How can I contribute to development?
« Reply #3 on: November 25, 2014, 02:47:56 pm »
Since the matter is this ...
I am studying the Lazarus / FPC and also PHP.
I would suggest that the documentation Lazarus / FPC was like the PHP documentation. At the end of the description, users could add additional notes which could be voted on.
I have no idea of the difficulty of organizing it. But I felt more easily to learn with the PHP documentation than the Lazarus / FPC, even for basic functions.
See, for example, two different functions in different languages:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.exit.php
and
http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/sysutils/abort.html
You can add notes, with examples and observations that can be voted in PHP.
In Lazarus / FPC, I think (not sure) that the user can edit everything, which may require more work. Often the text that there is already great, just lacking an example, which could come in the user comment. I think more people would help that way.

dmytron

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Re: How can I contribute to development?
« Reply #4 on: November 25, 2014, 04:13:48 pm »
Thanks for the answers. Is there any way I can help with the development, for example, with the Lazarus interface or anything else?

Edson

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Re: How can I contribute to development?
« Reply #5 on: November 25, 2014, 05:47:29 pm »
IMHO Patches and documentation are what Lazarus needs more.
Lazarus 2.2.6 - FPC 3.2.2 - x86_64-win64 on Windows 10

wp

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Re: How can I contribute to development?
« Reply #6 on: November 25, 2014, 09:06:39 pm »
Quote
I don't have a deep knowledge of Delphi and Pascal...
You don't need a "deep" knowledge, but you'll need at least "some" knowledge. Contributing to Lazarus is nothing for beginners. But every average programmer can contribute, no need to be a super-crack.

Focus on some topics which are interesting to you. Try to understand the examples provided with Lazarus or in the wiki or somewhere in the Internet. Read the users' questions in the forum. Try to understand them - many questions do not provide enough information, learn to see what is missing, run the demo programs which are sometimes added to demonstrate the error. Try to answer the questions, at first for yourself, then post your answer. If necessary write a little program to verify your answer.

Sometimes, out ouf a sudden, you'll understand things which you did not understand before. Since usually many people have the same difficulties like yourself write a tutorial or documentation in the wiki on your experience how you solved that issue. Everybody can contribute to the wiki! You don't need any permissions.

Write small improvements for the routines and components that you use but which bother you somehow. You may post that code here in the forum, and hopefully somebody else will take care of it. But it's better to learn svn and to learn how to write a patch. Look at the issues posted in the bugtracker and try to understand what developers need to process a patch.

Finally post your own patches to the bugtracker. I promise, it's a great feeling to see your first patch in the next release!
« Last Edit: November 25, 2014, 09:49:34 pm by wp »

JuhaManninen

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Re: How can I contribute to development?
« Reply #7 on: November 26, 2014, 08:20:57 am »
Thanks for the answers. Is there any way I can help with the development, for example, with the Lazarus interface or anything else?

You mean the graphical user interface of Lazarus?
Sure, it also needs improvements. IMO the best way to learn the code is to fix a bug, either from the bug tracker or something that you find is wrong or lacking.
There are some relatively easy ones related to GUI, for example:
  http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=13570
which is also targeted for the next 1.4 version.
You can learn code from the windows that already work. Once you can fix such a bug, you have already learned quite much code.

About the skill level needed: the language syntax is not a problem, the complexity of code is the main challenge.
If you have programmed with another language you will learn Pascal syntax quickly.
If you have not programmed much with any language then you must practice. Some people cannot work with a big code base even if they know the language, for some people it comes naturally.

Mostly Lazarus trunk and FPC 3.2 on Manjaro Linux 64-bit.

 

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