FlightGear Newsletter June 2014: Difference between revisions

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FlightGear Newsletter June 2014 (view source)

Revision as of 08:51, 25 June 2014

4,855 bytes removed ,  25 June 2014
These two sections were copied from the May edition. We have a "Contributing" section to attract new developers.
m (I seem to have removed the wrong section previously ?)
(These two sections were copied from the May edition. We have a "Contributing" section to attract new developers.)
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=== Usability Improvements ===
=== Usability Improvements ===
=== Getting your own ideas and features in FlightGear without having to be a coder ===
We've been seeing an increasing number of discussions on the forum started by people who are obviously eager to become potential contributors, either by adding new features to FlightGear, or by improving other aspects of FlightGear as a whole (community, infrastructure, usability, end-user support, accessibility, funding etc). Unfortunately, this has caused some friction over time, because people were expecting their involvement to work differently, especially those primarily making suggestions and providing feedback through discussions are obviously getting fed up with the community of contributors not responding directly to such feedback.
Now, we do appreciate any community involvement obviously, but people who are serious about actually bringing certain changes to FlightGear will find that just making suggestions will typically not work too well, and that just participating in lengthy community discussions is usually fruitless. We've had some extremely heated discussions over the years, some debating interesting ideas - and many ending up being dozens of pages in size, containing hundreds of postings. Often, these contain lots of good ideas and suggestions, but sooner or later these suggestions become emotional and are no longer constructive - yet, we're dealing with them constantly, which is taking up resources, i.e. time and energy. In an open source project like FlightGear, which is entirely volunteer driven, time is the most precious resource we have to contribute. It is like a "currency" for the project, and whenever something (or someone) is taking up lots of time without anything materializing, this is draining resources from other areas, no matter if it's end-user support or development in some shape or form.
We are now trying to document how "bootstrapping" a feature or project works conceptually, i.e. implementing new features for Flightgear - to provide a perspective that enables people to better understand how to bring changes to FlightGear without having to do all the work on their own. Note that this doesn't mean that this is the only way to accomplish something, but this is a tested and proven way - which we didn't come up with, but which is just a convention that happens to "just work", which is an important aspect for a non-organized project like FlightGear, where development itself also primarily "just happens".
Continue reading at [[Implementing new features for FlightGear]]...
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=== Getting involved as a programmer ===
Unfortunately, most of the active FG developers are currently very overstretched in terms of the areas that they have ownership of, which is affecting how much can actually be done.  Fundamentally we need more core devs.
If you are interested in contributing as a core developer, please see [[Howto:Start core development]].
If you interested in other developing, i.e. not C++ but [[Nasal]] scripting and/or XML, there are some articles listed at [[:Category:Popular Community Requests]] that have been suggested, but not fully or partially implemented, and are "mentored efforts". That means that the community is looking for a hand in implementing them -- help from ''you'' -- but will also have more experienced developers willing to help you, for example by having tailored tutorials or even code snippets written for you. As mentioned in each page, please get in touch if you would like to help with one of those projects. In comparison to C/C++, Nasal is simpler and easier to learn quickly. It also doesn't require recompiling, which means that you can test and develop changes with a standard FlightGear release, i.e. off of the main download page. As long as you can run FlightGear, you can also run Nasal code and contribute. Many tutorials covering a wide range of projects are listed at [[Nasal]], so if you know a programming/scripting language already, or would like to try something new, go ahead: read, write, try and get involved! When it comes to Nasal scripting, playing around with different tutorials and code snippets is more important than being an experienced coder.
{{CppBind Ideas}}
Of course, you're also free to work on whatever you want -- FlightGear as a community-driven doesn't tell people what to do, but welcomes any contributions from anybody, as long as they have acceptable quality and are free to be licensed under the GNU GPL. So if you have something you would like to contribute back to FlightGear, please get in touch! (Preferably using Gitorious for larger merge requests, and the forums or (core-) developer's mailing list to inform the developers of what you want to contribute back.) Changes contributed 6-8 weeks before a release will usually appear in the next release, so your changes can be spread across the world.
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== Release ChangeLog ==
== Release ChangeLog ==
Retrieved from "https://wiki.flightgear.org/Special:MobileDiff/73233"

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