Last week I wrote out an email on the mailing list stating my group's intentions on the Banshee project, our inexperience with an open source project as well as asking for a good place to start. I received a few emails from a few of the developers who pointed us in the right direction and also gave us a very warm welcome to the community.
Olivier Dufour pointed us toward the GNOME-Love Bug which is a site for those beginner GNOME project contributors. This site gave a lot of insight on how to proceed with contributing. It contains information about another IRC channel named #gnome-love as well as a mailing list for beginners. It also contains guidelines for code formatting, tutorials on languages such as C#, C++, Perl, Python, etc. as well as tutorials on the gtk+ and Glade 3 GUI libraries. The list of features goes on, but it is a great place to begin looking at because Banshee uses C# and the gtk+ library for the project.
Another Developer, David, pointed us to areas that we knew about from our initial research. He suggested that we should join the #banshee IRC channel, look at common questions and check out the bug list. Our whole group has covered this ground but it is still nice to get guidance.
The last developer to give us direction was one of the core developers, Bertrand Lorentz. He gave us a link to Gabriel Burt's talk about Banshee as well as a link to his own little idea for an extension that we could use. I have not checked out Burt's talk yet or the extension idea but if the idea is feasible for our group then I will add it to our list of possible contributions.
At this point my group and I have received plenty of places to get started. Our report on the Banshee project and our list of possible contributions to the project are up on the wiki. Our report looks to be finished but we still need a few more ideas for our project. The idea that is up right now for the project is a guard against Banshee setting the music library to default to the home directory in Linux. There is a way to fix this from the command line but the developers are thinking that there should be a guard against this happening. That way users do not have to go through the command line process to fix it.
My next step in this project is to look more in depth at the code to get an understanding of C# and how it utilizes some of Banshee's third party libraries as well as to get an svn client and experiment with that a little.
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