What Tools Do FLOSS Developers Need?

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday January 20, 2010 @06:07AM from the does-soda-count-as-a-tool dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I am a free software developer; I maintain one relatively simple project written in C, targeted at end users, but I feel that I could contribute something more to the FLOSS community than my project. Instead of focusing on another project targeted at end users, I thought that I could spend my time working on something FLOSS developers need ('Developers, developers, developers, developers!'). The question is: what more do FLOSS developers need from existing development tools? What would attract new developers to existing FLOSS development tools? Which existing development tools need more attention? I can contribute code in C, Python and bash, but I can also write documentation, do testing and translate to my native language. Any hints?"

2 of 310 comments (clear)

Code what you know best by bramp · 2010-01-20 06:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

You should code whatever you need. If you code something others need, you will either do it wrong, or get bored. Do what you know best.
Documentation by Anonymous Coward · 2010-01-20 06:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

My biggest problem with much of OSS is that the documentation is terrible. Try figuring out what the *right* way to do a "poll" type call on Linux is, or how to configure clustering with Geronimo and you will quickly realize that outside of reading the code there is almost NO good documentation on how to do more advanced things with open source software.