Getting Started

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Wed, 31 Jul 2013 10:32:59 +0530, you said:

> I am a computer science student. I want to contribute to the open source
> projects, debugging. As it is my first time, i need some guidance.

(a) You're better off replying to the list, as you then get answers from
others besides me.  Redirecting  back to the list.

(b) If you want to actually *help*, and have it set on being the kernel rather
than any one of thousands of deserving userspace projects, your best bet is

1) learn to build and install a self-compiled kernel.
2) just get a copy of the 'linux-next' tree
3) Update and build kernels every few days
4) watch them fail (and fail they will - I have at least 3 bugs I've tripped
over in the past week to report still)
5) Use 'git bisect' to identify the patch that caused the failure, and report
it to the appropriate people.

Quite frankly, the kernel needs less half-baked patches from novices, and more
qualified testers.  And you can get up to speed on testing a heck of a lot
faster than you can learn all the ins and outs of kernel code hacking.
And if you're ambitious, you can always add "(6) include a patch fixing
the problem" once you get better at it...

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