# Contributing

How can I contribute to &tde;?

&tde; is a free/libre software project that lives from voluntary contributions. Everybody is encouraged to contribute to &tde;. Not only programmers are welcome. There are many ways in which you can help to improve &tde;:

- Test the software.

- Send in bug reports. For more information, refer to How do I submit a bug report?.

- Write or edit documentation and help files.

- Translate programs, documentation, and help files.

- Draw icons, wallpaper, or compose sound effects.

- Write articles and books about &tde;. If you want to help spread the word about &tde;, send an email to devels@trinitydesktop.org. This will get you in touch with the &tde; developers and packagers.

- Program new &tde; applications. Please refer to programming for more information.

- Of course, sponsors are also welcome. :-)

There are several places to look for more information if you want to get involved in the development. The first step is to subscribe to some of the mailing lists. You will soon see something that can be improved or added.

How do I submit a bug report?

There is a bug tracking system available at http://bugs.trinitydesktop.org/ and thanks for helping! The system features several query types and a list of all known bugs.

The easiest way to submit a bug is to select Help Report Bug/Request Enhancement... from the menu bar of the application with the bug. This will open a dialog box with a link to the bug tracking system. Please follow the instructions of the bug reporting wizard.

May I join the development team?

Please! Join our discussion list at http://www.trinitydesktop.org/mailinglist.php. Join Internet Relay Chat (IRC) sessions at chat.freenode.net, channel: #trinity-desktop

I want to program for &tde;. What should I do first?

Everybody is encouraged to develop software for &tde;. What you should do first depends strongly on your experience, ⪚ whether you have already learned C++ or have experience with the &Qt; toolkit and so on.

To get into &tde; programming, you will need some basic tools: automake, autoconf, and cmake.

An excellent resource for learning &tde; programming is the &Qt; tutorials. These are installed along with &Qt;. To view them, open `$`TQTDIR`/doc/html/index.html` in &konqueror; and bookmark the locatio. The tutorials can be found under "Using Qt". The source code for each lesson can be found in the `$`TQTDIR`/tutorial` directory.

There is one thing everybody interested in programming for &tde; should do: please subscribe to the developers mailing list. To subscribe, you have to send an email to devels-join@trinitydesktop.org with an empty email.

Please read http://www.trinitydesktop.org/mailinglist.php. Everything written there applies to the development list as well.

How do I get access to &tde; GIT?

The &tde; project uses GIT to develop the core parts of the software. Usually, when you have changed one of the parts (⪚ fixed a bug), and you want to commit this change, the best way is to create a patch against a current snapshot and send this patch to the developer/maintainer of the respective program.

If you are doing this more or less regularly, then contact the developers to obtain write access to the GIT repository: devels@trinitydesktop.org.

Can I have read-only access to the GIT repository?

Yes. Instructions on how to get anonymous, read-only GIT access are here: http://www.trinitydesktop.org/wiki/bin/view/Developers/GIT

Are there any GIT mirror sites for &tde;?

No, currently there are no anonymous GIT mirror sites for &tde;.