savIRC

I understand that if you've never contributed to an Open Source project before, you aren't quite sure where to start, or how to start. Or even if you must know how to program. Well, this page is here to tell you that most of the preconceptions that you have will not be valid.

Yes, some jobs require programming, but only a few. The core developers spend more of their time doing other things than concentrating on writing code. Below you will find a list of potential jobs to help get you started.

Please remember, before contributing talk to us, and make sure someone else isn't working on the same thing! We don't want to waste your time, and we don't want you wasting ours.

If you are submitting code, please only send the diff.

Bug Reporter
When you discover a bug in savIRC or an error in the documentation, report in concise step by step instructions on how to recreate the bug. And possibly which procedure (proc) contains the bug.

Tester
This job is probably the most difficult, only because you must report the bugs that you encounter in a clear and concise way. You should also include instructions, step – by – step for recreating the bug in the report. This part is very important since it helps the programmer out tremendously, which means the bug could be fixed faster.

Writer
Do you enjoy writing? How about including a bit of humor in what you write? You could participate in keeping the Documentation updated. You must want to learn about every new feature, how everything works. Curiosity certainly helps. Our documentation is first written in an .rtf file, and then is converted to DocBook. If you only write that is fine. If you wish to learn the markup language that DocBook uses, that is fine as well. The DocBook markup language is very similar to HTML.

Packager
Don’t want to be included in a full on position of programming savIRC, but enjoy writing a bit of code? Maybe packaging is what you could help out with. The current developers only work on three different platforms. This means, there are many other platforms that could use packages. If there isn’t a package for your platform, you could update the Makefiles to support your platform for future releases. Or if you see problems with them, which is possible, you may update that as well.

Reporter
Report new releases of savIRC to various IRC related websites, and submit the latest release to Download sites.

Programmer
Work with the core development team to add new features, or fix bugs. savIRC is written in Tcl/Tk, however if you are new to programming or to this language we can help point you in the right direction.

Translator
Translate all of the documentation that the Project has, plus the text strings within savIRC itself. We are working the bugs out of a Translation Tool for savIRC. But translation work could start with the documentation that the Project currently has.

Artist
Spruce up the savIRC Project with your artwork! Create themes, icons, logos, bitmap images for backgrounds to the widgets. . .