Offer to help

[John Ralls]

On Feb 23, 2014, at 9:38 AM, Elise Scher <elise.scher01 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would like to help with the project on a part-time basis.
> I know a bit of C, having written some small programs in C.
> My English is very good. I grew up in Massachusetts and live near Stanford
> University.
> I would like to learn and help, please.
> 

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As for learning C while helping out: That’s a difficult undertaking. GnuCash is a very complex program without much in the way of code documentation. It’s also presently written as an object-oriented program using a rather obtuse OO library called GObject, and if you’ve never written OO code before, GObject is about the worst way I can imagine to learn how.

If I haven’t discouraged you yet, read the Development [1], Development Process [2], and Git [3] pages in the wiki, browse through the code on Github [4], then take a look at the recent bug list [5] and try to find one that you can fix. Make your patch according to the instructions on the Git page, attach it to the bug, and one of us will review it. If you have questions, ask here or on our IRC channel [6].

One more thing: You didn’t say what OS or development environment you use, but we strongly discourage trying to use Microsoft Windows for GnuCash development, and it doesn’t build in Visual Studio. If that’s what you have on your computer, consider setting up a virtual machine with Linux and working in that.

Regards,
John Ralls


[1] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development
[2] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development_Process
[3] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Git
[4] https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash
[5] http://tinyurl.com/m9xl4wk
[6] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/IRC