Re: New Contributor

[David Kastrup]

Simon Nagl <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello lilypond team,
>
> as a student of Information Technology I want to help making lilypond
> even better. I have some experience with C++ and Make, the other
> languages of the project are a new experience for me. But I have no
> fear to learn some new. Furthermore using git and unix tools like
> grep, find, ect. is no problem for me. The last skill I want to
> mention is that my mother tongue is german. So please do not blame me
> if I make some errors writing in English. But if you find some and
> correct them I will try to make it better the next time. I can do some
> translation work too.
>
> I am using lilypond for 2 years for rewriting songs for two chorals.
>
> What I did before writing this:
> 1) Reading most of the contributor's Guide
> 2) Suscribe to this mailing list
> 2) Installing LilyDev
> 3) Compiling LilyDev
> 4) Beginning to understand the software architecture of LilyPond

Well, I'm still stuck on that point but making progress.

> It whould be cool if you could give me some tasks. I think I can spend
> 2-3 hours weekly for this project.

Well, it's probably rather unsexy but the German translation would need
quite a bit of love: it is severely outdated.

A more technical task that needs more love is working on our GUILE 2
migration before LilyPond gets removed from Debian and other
distributions.

The issue tracker contains a wagonload of diverse tasks: one can pick
some and try working on them.  It may make sense communicating one's
thoughts about an issue first: some issues have a simple-sounding
description and will be quite hard for technical reasons to do.  So it
may be helpful to get an early warning.  A number of issues might be
low-hanging fruit and comparatively easy to do.  It's not a guarantee
that all "feature" requests will be well-loved when implemented.  Again
it makes sense to communicate on the developer list before investing a
lot of work into some particular task.

-- 
David Kastrup