gNewSense is developed by the Development Team.

This process is transparent to the public, and open to any contributor who demonstrates the necessary skills and commitment to the project.

gNewSense is based on Debian, sharing many of its packages, tools and techniques with that project. Differences between gNewSense and Debian are mostly freedom issues as stated in our FAQ.

gNewSense is released when it's ready and doesn't follow a set schedule.

Joining The Team

1. Read the Community Guidelines.
2. Join the development mailing list, introduce yourself, and tell us how would you like to help.
3. Create an account in the Web site and add yourself to the EditorGroup. This will allow you to edit most pages.
4. Create an account in Savannah. Savannah is the project management system used by gNewSense developers.

Communication

All the communications among the members of the Development Team and other gNewSense teams take place in the development mailing list and IRC.

• Mailing list: gnewsense-dev

• IRC channel: #gnewsense-dev

Tasks And Bugs

gNewSense developers use Savannah as their project management system. All gNewSense development teams use the Savannah issue trackers to report and track the status of tasks and bugs related to their respective fields. This is why joining the Team requires that you create an account on Savannah.

• Completing bug reports: bug reports marked Need Info should be investigated further. This is usually easier than fixing the bug because it doesn't require programming/packaging skills, just some time and effort.
• Check docs for non-free references: Some packages have build instructions for Windows that recommend using MS Visual C or other non-free build tools. Those should be weeded out. Build instructions for Windows users in itself are fine, but it should be doable with free software. Debian's codesearch could be helpful. It searches only in sid, but that's still a big overlap with our sources.
• BTS migration: We need someone to help with the migration from our current BTS inside pmwiki to Savannah: http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00298.<

Contact Kamping_kaiser in #gnewsense-dev channel on irc.freenode.net.

• Backporting Yeeloong video driver: We need someone to help bernie to backport the video driver of the Lemote Yeeloong to Lenny. See http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?28169.<

Contact bernie or djbclark in #gnewsense-dev channel on irc.freenode.net.

• Linux-libre: We need someone who can help lxo include our kernel changes/bugs in linux-libre scripts.<

Contact Kamping_kaiser or lxo in #gnewsense-dev channel on irc.freenode.net.

• Filing gNewSense freedom related bug reports to Debian BTS: People to make sure all our freedom related bugs are filed in the Debian BTS.<

Contact Kamping_kaiser in #gnewsense-dev channel on irc.freenode.net.

• Freeing Debian contrib: Freeing packages in Debian contrib (e.g. get packages which require Sun Java building and running with icedtea instead).<

Contact Kamping_kaiser in #gnewsense-dev channel on irc.freenode.net.

• Python Bazaar Savannah plugin: developing a Python Bazaar Savannah plugin (similar to the Launchpad integration) would be cool. (could only do local stuff atm, no apis).<

Contact Kamping_kaiser in #gnewsense-dev channel on irc.freenode.net.

• Mini-dinstall pool support: Modify mini-dinstall to support 'real' pool structures. (it's written in Python). <

Contact Kamping_kaiser in #gnewsense-dev channel on irc.freenode.net.

Bugs

Bugs that are also valid in Debian should be forwarded. Bugs that get solved should be added to the release notes of the upcoming release.