PLD-Quickstart-HOWTO

[Artur Skura]

What do you think?

BTW I think our web pages are completely foreigner-unfriendly.
What is the point of making "Contact" in English if the text
is in Polish? 

Regards,
Artur
-- 
http://www.wolneprogramy.org
http://mf.gnome.pl
-------------- next part --------------
Why join PLD team?
==================

PLD is the biggest RPM-based distribution in the world. If you want to
share this experience of developing a distribution made by over
a hundred volunteers, taking part in shaping the system - read on.

How to join?
============

This is really simple. First, visit http://www.pld.org.pl/index.en.php
(it says it's made by Poles and in Poland, you can ignore it). 
Subscribe to the mailing list pld-devel-en (the archives and info
about subscribing can be found at http://lists.pld.org.pl/).
Noe the real part: getting write acces to our CVS. You can get it by
filling up the form at http://www.tldp.org/cvs/pld.html. Iif you
already know some members of PLD-team, you can ask them to recommend
you as a new developer.

What can I do?
==============

A lot! First of all, you can try out all you exciting ideas. You can
add everything you ever wanted to have in a distro but couldn't. Of
course, if yoy want to introduce some revolutionary changes, it's a
good idea to ask others first.

You can start by looking at the .spec files. Having checked out the
specs from our CVS (cvs up SPECS) look at them and you can easily see
what needs to be added and modified. You can see the lists of
available CVS modules at http://cvs.pld.org.pl.

You can start by adding a new package. We have prepared a template
which can be a good starting point: check it out in /PLD-doc module in
our CVS (file template.spec). Ask people for opinion - on the mailing 
list or IRC (#pld). Don't worry if you make an error - you can always 
go back to a previous revision using -r option of cvs
get/checkout/update commands. If you modufy specs made by someone
else, be careful not to break anything. Always build before committing
(ok, unless you foun a typo). If you feel the package should be
rebuild and updaten on our ftp site (e.g. you have corrected a serious
bug), remember to increasre the release number. 

I want to see the results of my work!
=====================================

Be patience. The packages are sent for build to our building
machines. The building process succeeds for some and fails for
some. You can inspect the output logs at
http://buildlogs.pld.org.pl/. 

If everything is OK, your package is moved to the /test directory,
then - if no one complains, after a couple of days - to the main
tree. 

You can see if people use your package when they complain - and they
do! Check out http://bugs.pld.net.pl/ to see bug reports. Often these
issueas are trivial to resolve.