Communicating in Open Source

Slides from the Open Source Comes to Campus event at RPI.

Transcript

1. COMMUNICATING IN OPEN SOURCE Saturday, April 21, 2012
2. •Where to ask •What to ask •How to ask Saturday, April 21, 2012
3. DO YOUR RESEARCH Saturday, April 21, 2012
4. WORKFLOW • I have an issue. • Is it an issue with the project? • Check Google, StackOverflow, etc. • How do I communicate this to the project? Saturday, April 21, 2012
5. READ THE FRIENDLY MANUAL • Projects have different preferred communication methods. • Your project’s workflow is the only one that matters. • First place to look is the documentation. Saturday, April 21, 2012
6. MAILING LISTS / IRC Saturday, April 21, 2012
7. WHERE TO ASK FOR HELP • Is there a -dev and -users mailing list/IRC channel? • Write in a professional tone. • The shorter, and more self contained the example, the better. • Patience is key. Saturday, April 21, 2012
8. HOW TO ASK FOR HELP • A clear description of your goal, and what you tried. • Steps to reproduce the bug. • Example data if needed. • Your desired output, and the actual output. • Any relevant system info (compiler version, OS, etc.) Saturday, April 21, 2012
9. ISSUE TRACKERS • Always search first. • Make sure to categorize/tag things correctly. • All the steps on how to ask a good question apply to writing a good bug report. • Unit tests! Saturday, April 21, 2012
10. •http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html •http://sscce.org/ Saturday, April 21, 2012
11. QUESTIONS? Saturday, April 21, 2012