New Developers Guide

From Genunix

See also Developer HOWTO

This is a draft document. It is currently in note form. Very little on this page may be useful to you yet, as much of this information is already available on OpenSolaris.org. Any opinions or unintended non-facts are mine

Contents 1 Very brief how-to-get-started-as-a-developer 2 Finding work tasks 3 Contributing Code 4 Not documented elsewhere

Very brief how-to-get-started-as-a-developer

Before you begin: Sign and submit the SCA

Basic Steps:

1. Get your SCA number
2. Find something to do (More below)
3. Find a sponsor or sponsoring project or sponsoring Community Group
4. Work. Collaborate if necessary.
5. Code Reviews if necessary
6. Get the sponsor(s) to integrate for you (RTI)

Finding work tasks

For things to do, choices are many. Some examples:

• Documentation
• Tons of projects with code
• The OSo website itself
• Start easy, grab some easy bugs/rfe's

Contributing Code

• For detailed directions on how to actually download and build code for the ON consolidation, visit:
  • http://avinash.digitalmania.co.in/14

• A presentation given at a recent FROSUG meeting:
  • Charles Baker : Building OpenSolaris (OSo User Group page)
    • FROSUG – November 29th , 2007
  • Building OpenSolaris (pdf)

Or, of course, the OSo pages

If you're doing C coding, make sure you look at cstyle and check the guidelines as well as The style guide from the Developer's Reference

Articles in Category:Editors might provide help following the cstyle.

TeamwareToMercurial is meant to provide a transition guide, but it also provide good instructions for new developers.

Not documented elsewhere

Stuff you'll learn quickly (not found on the OSo site):

• Some projects come out from various places in Sun as fully or partially fledged projects -- no heads up, no public discussions. Just a public announcement about projects that are at least already half baked. If you plan to work on something of any significant size, be sure scan the mailing lists and post!
• Many RFE's/Bugs will be worked on also behind the scenes and integration occurs mysteriously and magically (e.g. sans public code reviews). As well, many of the bugs at "bugster" have data that isn't available publicly. This is a legacy of Bugster being a Sun internal DTS slowly migrating to its intended replacement. There's a process for fixing bugs, luckily, which has proven to generally prevent collisions outside the firewall.
• There are many consolidations. Not everything goes into onnv-gate. Many projects have their own Mercurial gate (and not all are even using Mercurial, some are on SVN).
• Not everything is open yet. Some things are still closed are in various states of being opened up. Notably, some of the build tools necessary to actually build Open Solaris are still closed.