Getting Involved

From ArchWiki

Jump to: navigation, search
Article summary
This article describes various ways Archers (both new and experienced users) can contribute to the Arch community. Note that this is not an exhaustive list.
Available in languages
English
Related articles
ArchWiki Tutorial (English)
Arch User Repository

In biology, mutualism is an interaction between two organisms in which each derives benefit. This principle can also apply to proactive and motivated members of the Arch community wanting to get involved and contribute to their favorite GNU/Linux distribution -- benefiting not only themselves and fellow Archers, but potentially all fans of Free and open source software.

Contents

Forums

One of the easiest ways to get involved is participating in the Arch Linux Forums. Please read Forum Etiquette first, then feel free share your ideas, lend a helping hand to new users, and get to know your community.

Wiki

If you feel capable of editing wiki pages, please see if you can manage tasks outlined in this section.

In the long run, the goal is a professional and easily-navigated wiki, such that supplementary guides, documenters, etc. are unnecessary. This is a community effort, but wiki maintenance is often a tedious and thankless task.

If you take on the task seriously, a formal position as a wiki maintainer may be in order. This gives the job purpose and recognition.

The current category tree is here: Table of Contents (English)

  1. Flag articles with appropriate article status templates (e.g. {{Deletion}}, {{Out of date}}, {{Translateme}}, etc.)
  2. Add content to stubs and expand incomplete or poorly-written articles.
  3. Add or improve translations; ensure that translations are in sync with each other.
  4. Reduce and combine duplicate pages.
  5. Correct inaccurate content.
  6. Reduce the number of categories. Scan the wiki for similar categories that should be combined; improve wiki navigation.
  7. Categorize uncategorized pages.
  8. Add article summary boxes to all articles.
  9. Update the FAQ with relevant questions from the forum and remove obsolete questions.
  10. Correct spelling, grammar, language, and style.
    • Remove extraneous links and content; text should be concise, tight, and readable.
    • Remove personal references ("I like to...", "My machine...") to maintain a professional tone.
    • Ensure all pages follow a similar style and layout.

Other useful pages for cleanup:

Bugs

Opening (and closing) bug reports on the Arch Linux Bugtracker is one of the possible ways to help the community. However, ineffective use of the bug-tracker can be counter-productive instead of being useful.

This article will guide anyone wanting to help the community efficiently by reporting or hunting bugs.

See also: Bug Squashing Day

AUR and Community Projects

Arch has a vital and active community of software developers and contributing projects.

The Arch User Repository is a community-driven repository of PKGBUILDs for Arch users. Packages in the AUR are built by the PKGBUILDs and are not pre-built binaries like from the official repositories. The AUR was created to organize and share new packages from the community and to help expedite popular packages' inclusion into the [community] repository.

If you have a project you would like to link to, this is a great place to do it. Include a link to your project, the date your project started, and a brief (one or two sentence) description of your project.

Note: All projects listed here are Community projects. None of these projects are considered official Arch projects.

Arch Based Distributions

Other distributions based on Arch Linux

AUR Helpers

Utilities to aid end users in using the AUR

pacman GUI Frontends

Graphical front-ends for pacman

Other

Projects that don't quite fit into any existing category

A third-party package repository and online discussion board for Arch Linux pro-audio users
A collection of some of the popular games in [unsupported], to save archers compilation time. They've also patched up many broken games that wouldn't compile.
@archlinux.us emails, Gmail based
Arch Linux Blogs
Mobile access to the @archlinux.us emails
Google Earth Arch user map
A collection of humorous quotes from #archlinux
Making Arch suitable for server use
namcap is an utility for Arch Linux which helps in automatic detection of common mistakes and errors in PKGBUILDs. This page is an automatically generated report obtained after running namcap against the core, extra and community trees.
Package management for OS X via pacman
An ALPM package and PKGBUILD parser in Python
Xyne's contributions to the Arch Linux community

As a developer...

This entry is mainly based on this post in Arch's BBS

Firstly, remember that the main motivation for your work on Arch should be helping the whole community, and not trying to become an "Arch developer" by any means. Secondly, you are also part of the community; to provide help to others means you will also help yourself.

Q: What can I do?

A: Here is a list, in no particular order, of things that you may want to do in order to make yourself useful to the community:
  • Establish a reputation as being helpful by offering assistance whenever possible
  • Answer questions on the forum, IRC, and mailing lists
  • Join the Trusted Users to gain packaging experience to show your skills
  • Submit packages to the AUR
  • Join one of the offshoot projects that may be incorporated into Arch mainstream someday, or start your own
  • Work on pacman, makepkg, initscripts, or other source code and submit patches to the bug tracker
  • Traverse the bug tracker and fix existing bugs
  • Find and submit new bugs
  • Fix wiki errors, add new pages, clean up existing pages, and make sure the procedures are up-to-date
  • Submit translations

Q: How can I become an Arch developer?

A: Usually, new developers are picked by the existing developers as the workload increases. Sometimes they post a position and you can apply to fill it, but more often, they just invite somebody they know would be good at it and would fit in well with the rest of the team. Having a portfolio of Arch contributions is the best way to make it on the team.

As an artist...

Feel free to share wallpapers, splash screens, color palettes, widgets, themes, etc. with the community on the forum.

See also: http://www.archlinux.org/art/

Personal tools