On Friday, September 6, 2019 4:51:04 AM EDT Jelle van der Waa wrote:
On 09/05/19 at 10:42pm, Eli Schwartz wrote:
Does anything in particular about pacman or package managers in general interest you? That is generally the best way to start. :)
If you just want some suggestions for uncontroversial bug fixes to look at, I could try to find something. :)
This bug seems to be an easy candidate to me: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/58391
Jelle: That looks like something I could probably handle. >_> I'm going to look into getting that done. Eli: My general motivation is that I am the type of person that likes knowing how things work, and why they work the way that they do. Pacman is a tool that I use daily, and compared to other package managers I've used on other distros, it's probably the most powerful and feature-rich. (That's including some of the 'scripts' and add-ons like pacman-contrib and makepkg) I've run through Linux From Scratch twice now, and the first time I got all the way to the end and realized that package management is not only a nice feature, it's absolutely REQUIRED unless you really enjoy manually hunting down dependencies and compiling a dozen applications just to update one. I love the fact that, not only does pacman handle all of that for me, but I can feed pacman my own packages and it handles them just like any other. I don't have to do very much thinking, and that's pretty much the gold standard for a great tool. Useable without thinking about using it. I thought I understood how Pacman works. And in a most general sense, I suppose i do. Looking at the source dir, there's a src file for every 'function' of pacman. But peeking inside, it's a rabbit hole of alpm calls and stuff I don't yet understand. And that intrigues me. So that, right there, is a good reason for me to dive in. Also, I enjoy being useful. Pacman is a console application, which I'm familiar with. I couldn't code a useful GUI to save my life. So pacman is an application I believe I -could- get 'intimately familiar' with. And I truly want to help and support the Arch community in whatever ways I'm able. (I just don't know where to begin. I troll the IRC, the forums, maintain a few AUR packages that don't really get used or updated.. I'm not actually -doing- anything. I like -doing-.) Plus, I think it was you who said "If you like breaking things, become a pacman developer. You can break lots of things."