This document aims to provide information on how one can get involved and help out with the Gentoo Scientific Project. Scientific packages are very diverse and many of us want our pet application in the main tree for easy installation. Due to the small size of our team, we can not implement all of them, so we really appreciate any contribution.
There are few obvious areas where one can help as we describe below. The Scientific Project tends to set strong requirements on testing, especially on core packages. Comments, thoughts, and feedback is greatly welcomed!
All good software has bugs. They are too many combinations of compilers, USE flags and versions to test them all. So if you find the time to report them, we would love to hear about it. We have the standard bugzilla system for this. Don't be afraid of all these fields to fill in, it's not that bad!
The Scientific Team in Gentoo has always had a high number of bugs. Fortunately, many of them are new packages. Any help in resolving issues, improving submitted ebuilds is greatly appreciated.
You don't see your application in the main tree or in the
overlays and you don't want to wait for someone else to
create the ebuilds? The most obvious solution is to develop
your own ebuilds. If you do so, it's always nice to share
them. You can post them to our bugzilla system and then one
of our devs will comment out. The
Join our
Meet some of us in #gentoo-science. It is a fairly quiet channel, but slowly growing and we are responsive. We can answer your questions, help you developing your ebuilds, share ideas, etc...
If you feel your questions are more private and don't need
to be known from the rest of the world, you can always
directly send an email to our developers
listed
You may not be interested in fixing ebuilds and testing
packages, but want to share your knowledge about some
software, configuration or tips and tricks. The best way to
do this is to write some documentation. You can even write
official Gentoo documentation such as our
If you would like to join our team of volunteers and become
an official Gentoo Developer, show activity in anywhere you
can: bugzilla, overlays, mailing lists, irc, forums,...
Please refer to
Benefits are huge :-) :