Help offered

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Michele,

On Mon, 6 Sept 2021 at 13:20, Michele Venturi wrote:
>
> What is a good way to start partecipate in your
> project? I'd like to give you a hand regularly. 🙌

Welcome to MacPorts and thanks a lot for your willingness to help the
project grow.

There are various ways to help, depending on your personal interests.
I'll list just a few that come to my mind first:

1.) If you are familiar with web programming (either Django, or just
pure design tasks), we would happily have someone contribute to
https://ports.macports.org/
(https://github.com/macports/macports-webapp) or to
https://www.macports.org. My personal wish would be to slowly migrate
more contents from the macports.org website to a common platform (but
I'm not sure if everyone agrees about that just yet).

2.) We need someone willing to take the time to finalize the migration
from docbook to asciidoc for our documentation (some parts of
conversion still go wrong and need to be either handled in the
converter, or manually). We would also welcome anyone willing to
update the contents (or actually rewrite larger portions) of
documentation.

3.) We have 20k+ ports. Many of them are outdated or broken and could
use some love. What most people contribute to are updates to various
ports that they personally care about.
One of the special tasks that doesn't require almost any special
knowledge and just takes a lot of time to do, would be migration of
all ports that depend on perl from perl 5.28 to 5.34. Most of the time
it's sufficient to just replace the version in all portfiles (and
ideally, but not necessarily test whether the modified port still
builds), but there are likely hundreds and any helping hand would be
mostly welcome.

4.) One area where we lack the workforce most is the macports base
code (the heart of the project that makes it even possible to use
MacPorts), written in Tcl.
    https://github.com/macports/macports-base

5.) We're looking for someone willing to play around with macOS VMs,
in particular the older ones: 10.6 (or even 10.4/10.5 for utter geeks)
and newer. We currently run CI jobs just on what GitHub provides (2 or
3 latest OSes), but it would be nice to set up disposable VMs where we
could fire up a VM, build the ports from CI, and destroy the VM.

The list is not anywhere extensive or complete, and it's probably
heavily personally biased. I can write more about any individual point
once you explain your interests and skillset (or what you are
interested in learning on the go).

Mojca