[retawq] Contributing

retawq Documentation
Contributing

If you'd like to contribute to retawq, the following short list is intended to indicate which kinds of contributions would be useful and which ones might rather waste your time.

- Reports about compilation/build failures are highly appreciated. I'm not able to test compilation on all possible combinations of hardware, Unix-like operating systems, libraries etc., so the program might not yet build in some environments.
- Reports about crashes of the program are highly appreciated. Reports about less severe problems (especially "cosmetical" ones) might often be pointless - many such problems are already known or not important enough at the current stage of development or will simply go away soon when the respective part of the program is overhauled in a later version.
- Requests about new or improved features are appreciated. Dozens of features are planned, but actual requests usually change the priorities and the order in which the features get implemented. So, say what you'd like to have and how important it is for you. Please keep in mind that one major goal of this project is to keep it small - monstrous things like a fully-fledged built-in HTML editor and web page authoring framework won't happen in retawq. :-)
- Translations of user interface texts to natural languages which aren't yet supported are appreciated, but please keep in mind that this means quite some work at the beginning and a long-term maintenance. :-) Before you start translating, please contact me in order to avoid duplicate work. You should be a native speaker of the language and a skilled writer in general, particularly regarding all those technical notions related to computers, user interfaces and networks. To get an impression, have a look at the existing translations - the ".po" files in the directory "i18n/".
- Please don't start contributing to the source code - at least not at the current stage of development. Many features are already "more or less" implemented and are just not yet visible in the public releases because they aren't yet "ready". (Lots of things are cut out, beautified or otherwise converted when a release package is auto-generated.) Also, your patches would not apply to the development tree due to these differences. Just to give an impression: once in March 2004, the output of "wc --lines *.[ch]" was far beyond 25,000 for the development tree and about 22,000 for the public release that would have resulted; the size of the .tar.gz file was beyond 400 KB for the development tree (although it e.g. doesn't contain the hardly compressable ".mo" files) and about 300 KB for the release.

When reporting any sort of problem, please have a look at the documentation file Reporting Problems.

This documentation file is part of version 0.2.6c of retawq, a network client created by Arne Thomaßen. retawq is basically released under certain versions of the GNU General Public License and WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. Copyright (C) 2001-2006 Arne Thomaßen.