Get Involved!
The Zero Install project is run by volunteers, and we're always happy to have new users, developers and evangelists! If you'd like to join us, please introduce yourself on our friendly mailing list.
Here are some suggestions for things you might like to try:
Create packages
If you've written some programs of your own, try making feeds for them. Report your experiences, bugs found and suggestions to the mailing list.
Evangelise
Zero Install has been working since 2003, but still many people haven't even heard of us. Writing articles for blogs, news sites, etc would be a great help. Let us know on the mailing list if an article gets published - we're always interested in feedback.
Also, asking software authors if they'd be interested in publishing a feed would be really useful.
Translate into other languages
You can create or update a translation using our Git repository, or on the web at our Transifex project.
Work on the code
There's a list of features waiting to be implemented on the roadmap page. To understand the system, some good starting points are:
- Getting the code using Git
- The feed file format specification
- The design of 0install (includes a diagram showing the main objects at the end).
- API example (a simple example showing how to use the Python API).
Some interesting possible starter projects:
- Using 0install for CMS's
- Many content management systems don't provide good support for updates of the system or plugins, dependency handling etc. 0install can do this quite easily (e.g. see the Drupal integration), but someone needs to try it with a larger selection of plugins, test it, and discuss it with the relevant CMS community.
Arch Linux native package support- Done!
And a few bigger projects:
- Improve the UI for repo.roscidus
- This site provides feeds for many well-known packages, some generated automatically from Debian packages, others uploaded manually. The site is currently maintained by editing HTML files manually and it's hard for multiple people to work on it at once. Some kind of system that lets a team manage groups of feeds easily would be much better. This task isn't all that easy, but it doesn't require any deep knowledge of 0install.
- Make first-time use easier
- Users without 0install should still be able to download and run 0install programs easily, in order to bootstrap adoption.
- Anything on the roadmap
- Lots of interesting ideas here.
