Contributing to Open Source Development

We'll be talking about how to contribute to open source hardware/ software development using 96Boards

Hack Chat

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Robert Wolff will be hosting the Hack Chat this week.

This Hack Chat is at noon PST, Friday, December 8th.

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If you've ever wondered how you can get involved with open source development, this chat aims to de-mystify with a discussion of how to contribute. We'll be using 96Boards as our example, which is a group of single board computers that uses many different processors and boasts a range of hardware specifications to make ARM processors easily available to developers. The specifications are open and define a standard board layout for SoC-agnostic (processor independent) development platforms that can be used by software application developers and other system software developers. 96Boards is produced by Linaro.

Robert Wolff is a technical writer, open source evangelist, community leader and engineer with a history of working in and around esteemed academic institutions and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics) based educational programs. Robert graduated from University of California, San Diego with a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering. During his undergrad, he was heavily involved with the Global Teams in Engineering Services (TIES) program. He participated in several humanitarian engineering projects, working in multi-disciplinary teams, to deliver useful prototypes to promote STEM education for underprivileged communities around his hometown of San Diego, California. It was during this time Robert began to develop an interest in open source, embedded system, and IoT.

Robert is the community manager for 96Boards at Linaro. He maintains several of 96Boards’ orgs and repositories, runs a variety of community driven projects/initiatives, and hosts his own live, weekly online video “podcast” dubbed “96Boards OpenHours”.

TL;DR

What is 96Boards?
How to contribute to open source projects using 96Boards

Technical challenges in designing an agnostic system

Technical challenges around documenting an open system

How 96Boards makes ARM development easier

96Boards community, ecosystem and resources

Please add your questions in the comments of this page.

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Contributing to Open Source Development HackChat Transcript
Shulie Tornel • 12/08/2017 at 20:56 • 0 comments

Robert Wolff Hello @All - My name is Robert Wolff and I work Linaro on the 96Boards team!!! I started off with Linaro as a Technical Writer, and now I am Community Manager for the 96Boards program. I maintain several org and repositories with my team and have pushed out several open source initiatives in the last year. Is everyone familiar with 96Boards? If you would like to read more visit https://www.96boards.org/about/ - here there is in depth description of our specifications and what we do.

KSwiton HI nice to meet You

ShaynaI think it would be great if you could tell us a bit more about 96Boards too :)

Robert Wolff @KSwiton nice to meet you too! :D

Robert Wolff @Ragnar is that OpenHour Ragnar

Manivannan Sadhasivam
For all 96Boards related projects, please visit: https://github.com/96boards-projects

Shayna Excellent

Robert Wolff Does anyone have any questions about what we do at 96Boards? Or we can of course take questions about our Open Source initiatives or Open Source collaboration in general

Shayna We can start off with the couple of questions from the comment page if you're ready (https://hackaday.io/event/28431-contributing-to-open-source-development)

Shayna (So just a note for everyone who has joined us in previous Hack Chats, questions aren't posted on a spreadsheet this time -- you can post them directly on this page: https://hackaday.io/event/28431-contributing-to-open-source-development )

Robert Wolff I found this one: "Any tips for newbies who want to contribute to open source projects? Thanks." from @ptalianos I would suggest the first step is getting familiar with git, and in my opinion getting familiar with GitHub. A LOT of Open Source projects are collaborated on through GitHub. If you can master the GitHub workflow, you are in great shape!

Manivannan Sadhasivam Best tip: Persistence is the key. Don't get embarrassed with any review comments just take it positive and learn from your mistakes :-)

Robert Wolff There are plenty of resources out there for anyone interested in learning Git and using GitHub.

Robert Wolff @Manivannan Sadhasivam Yes! :D its true

Robert Wolff Most people in Open Source want to help you learn, getting your feet wet and over coming that first contribution is key

Sahaj Sarup @ptalianos Even something as simple as submitting an issue or a bug report can count as a contribution. And that's where most people start.

Manivannan Sadhasivam Before contributing to any project, please do read the Contribution policy/Submission guidelines

Robert Wolff @Manivannan Sadhasivam if you are lucky enough to be working on a project that has "guidelines or a policy" :P

Todd Or contribute documentation. Most OS projects are sorely lacking in it.

Andrew I have a related question actually - for someone who's fairly confident in writing code and with git/github, what's the usual etiquette/process for figuring out what needs to be worked on

Robert Wolff @Todd Yes! Documentation is hugeeeeeeee. Most Open Source projects are seriously lacking in documentation

albedo.decero @Andrew Usually the Issues tab

Robert Wolff @Andrew It is nice when a repository posts a "to-do" list... But this is not always the case. The best thing to do here is to find out where there communication takes place. This could be in a mailing list, IRC, a forum, in the issues tab etc...

Todd sometimes the code has `@TODO`'s in it also

albedo.decero @Andrew, Some tag issues with PR (pull request) Welcome

Robert Wolff @Andrew You can establish a report with maintainers by simply joining their correspondence threads.

ptalianos @Robert Wolff @Manivannan Sadhasivam @Sahaj Sarup @Todd That was...
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ptalianos wrote 12/08/2017 at 20:05

Hello Robert, thanks for joining us for the hack chat.

Any tips for newbies who want to contribute to open source projects? Thanks.

Are you sure? yes | no

Manivannan Sadhasivam wrote 12/07/2017 at 17:14

Hey @Chris ,

You can use gmail client to send patches. You just need to turn off the HTML mode and switch to plain mode.

I personally use git send-email to send patches and mutt to reply to comments. Mutt always send emails in plain text mode, so developers often prefer it.

Hope this helps you to setup environment for contributing to linux kernel.

-Mani

Are you sure? yes | no

Chris wrote 12/07/2017 at 21:51

This is great info - thank you very much!

Are you sure? yes | no

Robert Wolff wrote 12/08/2017 at 04:47

FYI: @Manivannan Sadhasivam is a member of the 96Boards team working as an Applications Engineer. He will be joining us tomorrow for the hack chat as well! :)

@Chris :

kernel.org has a list of recommended email clients: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/process/email-clients.html#email-clients

I have seen and heard some of my colleagues using "Mutt".

Hope this helps!

Are you sure? yes | no

Chris wrote 12/06/2017 at 20:55

What is the easiest way to get set up to contribute patches? We hack up the Linux kernel a bit at work and I've found a few bugfixes that I'd happily contribute back upstream. I read through this: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.11/process/email-clients.html

The problem is, I only use outlook for work and gmail for non-work. Outlook isn't on the instructions and they say that gmail won't work...

The 'git send-email' man page shows instructions for using gmail, though. But if there are questions/feedback about the patches, will gmail mangle my replies?

Is there a recommended 3rd party email service to use that I can just set and forget?

I'd happily set up a new email account for this purpose. I'd prefer something web-based to avoid repeated installation/setup of clients. But I understand if using a Linux client is best -- but if that's the case, then a suggested client and setup instructions would be great. I probably wouldn't use this account for anything other than interacting with the open source community.

I thought I was maybe alone on this, but a coworker yesterday said he was trying to figure out the same thing.

Are you sure? yes | no

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