[Pkg-electronics-devel] Joining/ contributing to pkg-electronics

[Carsten Schoenert]

Hello Jeff,

(please use Reply all or at least address any email answer to the 
pkg-electronic-devel list :-) no need to address me, I'm subscribed to 
the list)

Am 29.08.22 um 15:37 schrieb Jeff Croxell:
> Hi Carsten,
> 
> Thank you for following up with me.
> 
> My primary goal is to contribute in some way.  I have not previously 
> contributed to FOSS and my hope is to change that.

you are of course very welcome!
The electronic team is probably not the most active team, at least not 
visible to users, but it has some very specific and interesting packages 
that get maintained in these team.

> Without a full resume, I have previous experience with Debian packaging 
> (closed source), am an electrical engineer (partly how I made it to this 
> group), and have a background in C,  C++, and Python.
> 
> I also found my way here trying to use Andruino IDE with my daughter
> on her Ubuntu device and having issues. 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/arduino/+bug/1916278 I am 
> also hoping to get involved with the Arduino project as I see there 
> are quite a lot of aging elements there.

I'm aware of this issue within Ubuntu as I'm one of the persons which 
have updated the Arduino IDE within Debian. :)
The real problem is within the package listserialportsc and not inside 
the Arduino packaging.
Within Debian this problem isn't existing.

> My personal goal is to learn how the community works together and the 
> right way to contribute.  I am an aging engineer who is moving towards 
> management and am hoping this can be an outlet.

I also wouldn't call my self an youngster ;) and some members of the 
electronic teams are also in the best age, but this makes talking to 
others (no matter of by real talking on conferences or meeting, nor 
through email exchange) quite interesting and somehow effective. You 
will slightly realize quickly that the person on the other is really 
knowing the things he is talking about.

> I'm a bit unsure how to get started so am happy to work on something 
> good for beginners or whatever can help you.

Well, that depends really on the parts you are interested in.

If not already known there is a small wiki page about the electronics 
team (which could be updated a bit for sure). But this requires some 
deeper knowledge about the pkg-electroncs-team universe I guess.

https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/pkg-electronics

If you are interested in bug fixing you find some links there which will 
point to the packages and/or to open issues within the packages. Also 
there is the link to the team subgroup an salsa with all the VCS trees 
of the packages.

As you pointed out some experience with the Arduino IDE, there exists an 
page too in the wiki. Maybe you have found glitches there which need 
some better explanation or tips for users of the package?

https://wiki.debian.org/Arduino

Some kind of beginner like issue is #1005115 [1] which isn't really hard 
to fix I think. If you want have a look at this than this would be great.
At one day you will also get in deeper touch with the packaging of 
Debian packages any way, the Arduino package isn't a simple package, but 
also not a very complex or big package.

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1005115

Or you are interested in get some software into Debian?

-- 
Regards
Carsten