Dear ladies and gentlemen of the recruitment-mailing-list, the new-volunteer-orientation-website always tells me to introduce myself. So let's get started. I am Jonathan Kuehn as you might know from my mailaddress. I am studying Computer Sience at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität-Erlangen-Nürnberg (or short "fau") in Germany. I did join this mailing-list, because I want to learn more about programming in bigger projects and I want to use this as my first step in the opensource-communtiy. But most of all I want to train my own programming skills. I didn't join the dev@, because I'm not sure if I want to get ~80Mails per day as the website claims and I don't think I have much time to spend on this project for the next half a year, because students live is harder than many think, if you want good marks without being a genius. I read through most of the first 2 Levels but I skipped making all this accounts, because I fear I won't use them often. (This could change when I'm deeper in this project).
So I got some questions: To start with a stupid one: Do I really need to join the dev@ or can I procrastinate this to a later point in time? Can I help you without joining it, but waiting until I feel more comfortable joining it? How can I know where you need help? You use subversion. As I am not (yet) allowed to submit changes myself, do I need to install it? Where can I find the source code/documentation/tests or whatever I shall work with, and how should I know which part is important for me at the moment? I didn't learn C++ yet, but I think I have to learn it this semester, but I got basics in C. Should I wait, until I got basics in C++ before doing anything with your code, or is knowing C and Java as object-oriented language enough to understand your (C++)-code and write some myself? Wait, thats sounds a bit like I think that C++ don't need to be learned if you did learn C. But I think I heard somewhere, that C-code is C++ compatible, is this true? I won't ask any more C <-> C++ questions here, I don't think this is the right forum for this... I think this are enough questions for the beginning, I tell you if I know more. Feel free to ask me anything you want. I'm waiting for some answers and will be glad to work with you together on this project. Sincerely Jonathan Kühn PS: Sorry for my bad english, I'm no native speaker.
