Request for Guidance on Contributing to X.Org and Interest in EVOC Program

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

On 30.07.24 16:28, Jayant Pranjal wrote:

Hi,

> I hope this message finds you well. My name is Jayant Pranjal, and I am
> currently pursuing a degree in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT
> BHU. I am writing to express my interest in contributing to X.Org and to
> seek guidance on how to start this journey.

welcome to the club :)

> I have always been passionate about open-source development, and I
> believe that contributing to X.Org would be a fantastic opportunity to
> enhance my skills,

Indeed. By diving deep into Xorg, you'll lean a lot of computer history
(still supporting machines older than you ;-)) and lots of C black
magic. You'll probably find lots of things your professor might consider
evil practises (but they're there for good reasons (*1)).

But one thing must be clear: Xorg is a pretty slow moving and very
conservative project. People here are very cautious of not breaking
anything. And reviews can take quite some time. Don't let that frustrate
and discourage you. Any contribution is worthy, no matter whether it
finally get merged or out. (even if something turns out to be completely
broken, there's always great opportunity to learn a lot from that).

> However, as I am new to this, I would greatly
> appreciate any advice or resources that could help me get started.

The first step, obviously, is getting the whole thing built and running.
https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2024-June/059249.html
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/metux/xorg-testing/

It's not focused on actual development, but building everything in a
chroot/jail for easier testing. (the idea is giving testers out there
a simple tool that takes care of all the burden on building a testable
Xorg setup, so they can run it on their HW - w/o messing up their
OS installation)

Right now, it always tries to build from the exact sources it's
configured to. For development, you'd need it to leave your sources
(you might have changed) alone and just build those.

Maybe you'd like to start with extending that tool with some "developer
mode", which eg. doesn't try to kill your local changes ;-)

Another open issue: it's not yet actually starting the Xserver and
running some tests on it. We already have a bunch of tests in the CI,
which could be integrated into the testing ground. Or maybe you've got
some a better ideas, eg. how to testing some actual applications (maybe
even take framebuffer dumps and check whether certain things have been
painted correctly).

To the practical workflows:

We're doing most work via gitlab (merge requests, tickets, ...). Thus,
you'd need an account on gitlab.freedesktop.org (look through the
maillist archive for advise on getting fork permissions on gitlab).
If you're not confident w/ gitlab workflows in general yet, just let me
know :)

When you've got something ready to review, submit a merge request
(you may CC me directly, as I'm not frequently monitoring all the MRs),
then we can talk about it.


have fun,

--mtx

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Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
Free software and Linux embedded engineering
info at metux.net -- +49-151-27565287