In the following excerpt, Amir E. Aharoni pointed out a problem several
people have in joining some of the more successful big Free Software
projects (OpenOffice is especially guilty in this respect).
The problem of setting up is not only due to the need to download and
install extra packages, but also due to conflicting tools and versions
of tools needed by different projects and the developer's own work.
The only big Free Software project to be open in this respect, of which
I am aware, is the Linux kernel project. This is the only project, for
which several distributions provide ready-made packages of source code,
development environment, and re-compilation support.
I wonder whether it's possible to do one or more of the following:
1. Build, for popular distributions, packages and meta-packages which
cause the full build environment for a project to be installed.
2. Build pre-configured virtual machines for downloading by people, who
want to contribute to a big project, but need to avoid being bothered by
the build environment installation and setting up. With today's hard
disk capacities, a developer can afford to have multiple virtual
machines. Several tricks can be employed to allow people to download a
full virtual machine, and automatically set it up, without having to
download a single file longer than 1GB or so. For example - download a
virtual machine, and set it up to execute a script downloading extra
packages and installing them (inside the virtual machine).
--- Omer
On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 11:24 +0300, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
> > So my grand advancement of the universe and world peace is to get
> > diagnostics print:
> > 'You used either "use strict" or "use strict vars"....'
> >
> > not much, I know, but I now I have my name in the Perl source code.
>
> Congrats.
>
> I very often have ideas for little fixes in big Free Software projects
> such as Mozilla, Eclipse or Perl, but too often the actual work of
> setting up the development environment, finding the file to fix and
> submitting the patch seems cumbersome.
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