I am toying around with the idea of getting involved in Asterisk more seriously. I got my box running and right now there’s not much left to tweak that I would be interested in. I’m not pursuing Asterisk consultancy. Not as long as I have my current job anyway, which furtunately leaves a few spare brain cycles to spend.
What’s the entry strategy for becoming a more serious contributor? After years of SW development on commercial SW products and projects, i’ve shifted gears away from hands-on software development. I miss that, not so much for the politics, but the blanc metal stuff… I’m courious how the dynamics of OSS projects play out. I’m also up for docu as long as it’s not cleaning up after other people’s mess.
Thanks guys for pointers.
i am pretty much a newb at asterisk in general, and don’t have any coding skills in C (decent in PHP, but that doesn’t really count), so what little I’ve done is mainly testing. i helped out with a couple of small bugs and learned quite a bit just by going through the code after seeing something unexpected on the CLI…
my vote would be to go and test bugs - that will give you an idea of how the code is structured as well as give you a chance to do some light coding/recoding.
then again, you are light-years ahead of me, but that is how i’ve tried to help. i have a couple of patches for app_queue that i’ve created (mainly small logging things) but haven’t had the courage to post, as i’m probably the only one who would get any benefit from them.
whoiswes, thank you…
Good idea… Bug fixes, yes, if developers are needed for that, absolutely. The problem with this kind of work from a cold start: the overhead to integrate a new developer is typically higher than fixing the problem outright, OTOH, it worked for you so I might tackle it from your angle.
My direct question then: Where do I sign up? (What is the process)
bugs.digium.com is the main bugtracker, and i just started browsing issues. you can create an account, and then it’s a matter of creating/testing patches or troubleshooting bugs…there are some guidelines posted that you should read (you’ll need a disclaimer on file before you can submit any code for review).
please don’t consider my posts to be anything more than novice level - i was able to learn quite a bit more about asterisk by browsing the bug tracker, and figure that others would probably benefit from a similar approach. i’m a learn-by-doing guy, i can’t understand something until i can tear it apart. unfortunately, 99% of the code base is completely incomprehensible to me, and the little bit i do understand is so basic that i’ll probably never contribute anything meaningful, but i’ve been able to fix a few minor problems by modifying the source code myself…but a programmer i am not.
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Thank you, i guess i’ll poke around over the weekend.