[Gnash-dev] Re: How can I help? [Was Re: Configure the browser plugin to not print messages to stdout/stderr?]

[Rob Savoye]

On 12/20/09 12:33, Richard Wilbur wrote:

> I can only offer part-time help as well, but I am interested in helping.
> 1.  What do you folks need the most help on?

  Keeping our kde4 support working as you do now is a big help. There
are always other little things than never get done, like rescanning all
the strings for the translations, documentation improvements, bug
fixing, more testcases, etc...

> 2.  What's wrong with the build farm?

  A mix of hardware problems, and system administration. The hardware is
all really old PCs, and they're all showing their age. It'd probably be
better to replace the hardware than it is to fix it. I use primarily
real PCs instead of VM images, as in my experience, VM images can be
unstable, especially as you work with other OS's than linux.

  But it's mostly sysadmin tasks. Keeping all the machines up to date is
important, but most are already one release behind for the BSDs. The
other problem got to be buildbot was overly sensitive to minor problems,
so it got to be where most of the time, it thought the builds had
failed. Fixing all the little subtle bugs found by distcheck, make
check, etc... turns out to be a time consuming task. It's almost more
efficient for me to do builds by hand, as it's pretty well automated in
Gnash. I got tired of how just keeping it all working could suck up much
of my day when I'd rather be coding.

  Lately I've been getting access to other's build machines, which helps
alot. That's what I do for my Debian-mipsel builds, and now
GNewSense-amd64. I'd love to get access to more machines, like native
ARM. Using other people's machines helps, as they do the maintainance.

        - rob -