i just wanted to point out that neither building packages, nor having any prior coding/compiling experience are essential; though regarding any software project, people generally do have the opposite impression and are reluctant to get involved
though this may not be true for every free software project; one of the main goals of parabola, beyond merely providing a fully-libre operating system, is to teach people how to exercise control of their own computing, by making practical use of software freedom - although that is the consensus opinion of the parabola devs (and based on discussions i have had with some of the most senior team members such as aurelien, that has always been so), it is not actually expressed anywhere formally - ive suggested revising the "social contract" into more of a conventional "mission statement", rather than a list of promises - in that form, it could be amended to include "advancing computer literacy" as a stated goal it would be quite alright for someone with little or no special experience to join the team - we would be more than happy to teach the specific skills that one would need to move onto more advanced tasks - one could start off with bug triaging for example, and most of the skills necessary for maintaining packages and documentation, would be acquired in time, as a matter of course even for someone who was not interested in coding at all, there are several ways that one could be considered as a full member of the team, that would not require any programming or sysadmin skills - the most important factor justifying the formal induction procedure, would be the demonstration of one's long-term dedication to the project, rather than a fleeting interest, which is often seen it is merely coincidental that in the past, parabola devs have been inducted on the merits of their prior technical contributions - it is a marvelous testament to the relatively high skill-level of the parabola team as a whole, that we can do so much with so few hands; but that necessarily leaves some important, albeit less technically demanding tasks unattended, such as documentation, aesthetics/UX, and triaging bugs on the lesser-used DEs theova, for example, started by updating out-dated wiki articles - that is a valuable contribution on it's own - one could join the parabola team if only for the dedication to maintaining the wiki; or any other special tasks such as artwork, or community relations such as moderating the forum, publishing news releases, and fielding/mediating questions from reddit and the fediverse - it is in practice, more fruitful to have non-technical people attending to those tasks - the most technically-skilled people generally approach those tasks from too high of an abstraction level, which is actually sub-optimal _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.parabola.nu/mailman/listinfo/dev
