How you can help: Dries RPM Repository

You can help in different ways and all help is appreciated!

First i would like to ask to have some patience when you send a mail. I still have a girlfriend, job, family, friends, other hobbies, .. in short: a life. Making rpms is a hobby, it's not my fulltime job. So sorry if you don't get an answer in a timely fashion. This is also the same for Dag and other packagers. I get quite a lot of mail so if i forget your mail and it's important: just send it again! You can also try sending it to the rpmforge users mailinglist and maybe another user can help you.

Bug reporting

Testing and bugreporting is important. Every system is a bit different and some programs may work perfectly on my system but not on yours. It's always very helpfull for me and also for other users if you send a bugreport. Some stuff which might be interesting in a bugreport:

• What is the exact name, version and release of the rpm?
• What is the name, version and architecture of your system? For example: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 for AMD x86_64.
• How did you install the rpm? For example: from url xyz or with smart from repo dries.
• What do you have to do to reproduce the problem? For example: click on button abc.
• Do you have the problem each time?
• Do you have log output or strace output? This is always very valuable.
• Did you find something about the problem on the site of that program?
• Do you happen to know how it can be fixed?
• If needed: include a screenshot
• Did you check the mailinglists of forums of that program?

Good in english?

You probably noticed already: English is not my primary language. You can let me know if there are errors in summary lines, descriptions or changelog entries in rpm packages. If you want to actively search for problems: you can find all the spec files in the subversion or on this site, for example the aget spec file. There are probably also a lot of errors on this site to report :-)

You can help keeping track of updates to programs.

You can let me know if programs are way out of date and need an update. Keeping track of newer versions is a lot easier if the release is announced on http://freshmeat.net. Anyone can put information on freshmeat, you do not need to be the author of the program. So you can help me and also other users and packagers by adding your favourite program to freshmeat and by keeping that information up to date. If you notice that a new version is released but the freshmeat record isn't updated: consider sending a kind mail to the corresponding freshmeat.net account to get it updated.

Menu entries: icons, groups and so on

A decent menu entry (a .desktop file) is important. A .desktop file is simply a text file and there's no programming involved. You can find a lot of examples on your harddisk in the directory /usr/share/applications/ . There's a desktop entry specification at the Freedesktop site. Not every program with a UI provides a .desktop entry so some spec files create a .desktop file, for example at the moment of writing: the frozen-bubble spec file. How you can help:

• If an upstream project (for example some game) doesn't provide a .desktop file yet: make one and submit it to the project.
• If the menu entry lacks a nice icon: create one and submit it to the upstream project.
• If the menu entry is not in the right group: provide a patch to the upstream project.

How can i help more technically?

Patches for spec files are always appreciated! Not every spec file works on every distribution/architecture so there's still quite some work. For example a lot of programs still wont work on 64bit platforms like amd64. Also a lot of programs wont compile with the newest versions of the gcc compiler. This is also a great way to learn a lot about programming languages :-)

Some remarks if you're going to create a patch:

• There might be a newer version of the program which already fixes the problem. There might already be a fix in CVS/SVN/.. .
• A patch might already exist in other distributions or repositories. Some searching with google might reveal a lot of information.
• Also don't forget to check the site or mailinglists or fora about the program.

Other spec file errors

Sometimes projects change their license so the license tag of a spec file might be wrong. Sometimes i pick the wrong group so it's difficult to find the program in Smart. There might be build requirements or normal requirements missing. Most of the time, people don't notice this kind of problems. If you happen to find one: let me know!

New spec files

You can also create new spec files. Please consider using a template, for example the template used by Dag.

Financial help

If you want to help financialy:

My amazon wish list