Re: [gentoo-java] Greetings from a new volunteer

[Joshua Nichols <nichoj@gentoo.org>]

Hello, and welcome!

Grant McDorman wrote:
> Greetings to all. I've volunteered to assist the Java team (following
> the public plea in the Gentoo weekly news). I've already received a
> note from Karl T., and have subscribed (obviously) to this list.
>
> Let me introduce myself. I've been in the software development
> business for a long time; I worked for what is now UNISYS in the
> language products division, for a now-defunct Canadian airline
> (Wardair), the Ontario public power utility, and am now working at
> Cedara (a medical imaging company, http://www.cedara.com).
>
> Relatively speaking, I'm a latecomer to Java - I started with APL, of
> all things, and went through numerous other languages. I'm using Java
> at work these days (we have a layer in our imaging toolkit that is in
> Java - although, oddly, it is _not_ crossplatform - yet). I use
> Netbeans as my IDE at work (or a plain vanilla text editor). All of
> this is currently on Windows. (Yes, I know that's unusual - but that's
> what our customer wanted, and money talks.)
>
> I also am responsible for a couple of very small projects on
> SourceForge - vncsnapshot (http://vncsnapshot.sf.net) and
> xtaskmanager. The former gets a bit of attention; the latter, little
> to none. Both are written in C (with a little C++ in vncsnapshot,
> inherited from the VNC source code base).
>
> I'm not very conversant with ebuilds, although I have written one or
> two, and modified a few others (I only submitted one or two to the
> Gentoo bugs, though).
With regards to Java, our ebuild documentation is at:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/java/java-devel.xml

At the bottom, there are links to general developer documentation.
>
> At home, we have five machines - one is a server and firewall; the
> remaining four machines are each for one of the family members. All
> are running Gentoo; the personal machines are dual-booted with Windows
> XP, but only to play games. (My wife, in fact, doesn't use Windows at
> all.)
>
> Personally, I'm older than I care to admit. I have been married for
> twenty years, and have two children, both boys, who are now 15 and 17.
>
> So, with respect to the Gentoo Java project: I've looked over the
> documents and bug list. I note that most bugs are ebuild problems
> rather than program bugs. What would you like me to start with?
>
As far as what to work on, my mantra has always been to work on either
a) what interests you, b) what you need, or c) things that bother you.
Basically, find an itch and scratch it :)

> Note: I can be contacted at this email address (grmcdorman@gmail.com),
> or via Jabber (grmcdorman@myjabber.net). I do have a few other email
> addresses, but anything sent to Gmail I will see in short order. I'm
> not likely to be on the IRC channel, as I haven't had any reason to
> use that in the past.
If you plan to get very involved with the project, I recommend joining
the channel. Most of the team spends at least some time in the channel
(some more than others ;) ). I've found it to be the most expedient form
of communication for what we do. At the very least, I suggest joining
the channel when you are working on Java stuff or reading through our
documentation.

Regards,

-- 
Joshua Nichols
Gentoo/Java Project Lead
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