Contributing
Hello there, glad you are reading this page. We have a broad spectrum of topics to contribute, and some of them do not even require programming or scripting knowledge. With each contribution, you don't just get to help out your fellow postmarketOS friends, but there's always a chance to learn something new and sharpening your skills along the way. And of course fun, fame and epic stories to tell to your grandchildren about what a badass hacker you have been. Now pick what interests you most.
Contents
GitLab issues
First of all, consider subscribing to the GitLab issues. The most important discussions happen there, on all levels. From broad visions and blog posts to implementation details and bug reports. Voice your opinions and help out others with your knowledge, so there are more people that can in turn help out yourself when you get stuck. If you are a developer, consider testing and reviewing incoming patches (merge requests). The more eyeballs on the code, the less bugs get introduced.
To work on something specific, see the issues tagged with help wanted (easy ones).
Documentation and Blogging
Wiki documentation
- Create new pages if you found a new postmarketOS topic worth documenting. If you did not find what you want to create, click "create new page" in the search results.
- Structure:
- Improve the structure of the wiki, make sure there's a clear path from the main page to every specific page that the user would be interested in
- Fix the orphaned pages and links to non-existing pages (do not add more of those!)
- Add and use wiki categories where it makes sense
- Formatting:
- Proper template usage
- Proper wiki formatting
- Put code listings/shell-session outputs in syntax highlighting blocks
- Fix pages with syntax highlighting errors
- Other fixes for existing pages:
- Check if the sentences make sense
- Fix typos and grammar
- Add links to relevant GitLab issues and other pages
Blog posts
The current scheme of blog posts works like this: going through the recently closed merge requests and photos posted in the chatroom/wiki, categorizing them into logical sections before writing one paragraph after another and adding images to round it up. Contributing to any step of that process would be greatly appreciated and saves us a lot of time that we could put in other areas of the project. Get in touch with us in the postmarketOS.org issues.
We are also open to a new format of blog posts, writing shorter ones about specific changes that happened in the project rather than having these epic-but-time-consuming long reads every few months.
Hacking
- Make sure you did not overlook the help wanted (easy ones) links above
- Install postmarketOS to a real device or boot it with QEMU
- Port and mainline devices you own
- Start dogfooding and improve postmarketOS for your real life use case
- Improve the packages we already have (How about your favorite UI?)
- Work on osk-sdl and charging-sdl
- Get involved with lowlevel hacking
Help out others
Get active in the community and help everyone along the way, with motivation or practical tips on whatever they are doing.
Tell your friends!
- Print yourself a postmarketOS fair trade t-shirt and wear it!
- Write blog posts on your own platforms
- Share our web links
- Make good photos/videos of devices running postmarketOS for the wiki and for /r/postmarketOS
- Tell your favorite online or print magazine about postmarketOS
Help upstream projects
You probably know the whole "we are standing on shoulders of giants" speech. Depending on the components you are looking at in postmarketOS, the giants are not that big and bloated, but of course they would happily accept help by contributors interested in their projects.
Administrative
This list is for admins only, most people don't need to bother with this stuff.