want to start contributing c code to a project

Hi,

With my c skills, I wanted to start contributing to a small c-based project*, probably open source.

I was looking into the source code of the more familiar ones, say the linux kernel or ffmpeg or mplayer, but obviously I find the more famous ones to be too big and heavy-hitting. Really, I was looking for a small one where the code base is not so big and I could learn from it.

I'm not asking anybody to look about for me, rather asking if there was anyone here who may know of one fitting that description (c-based, small, open source, pref. GNU tools) where a certain amount of learning (as opposed to productivity) could be tolerated.

I dare say there may be someone here who is already in such a project.

Cheers!

(*school projects excluded, sorry)

The place to look would be on say sourceforge.net

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Originally Posted by stabu

I dare say there may be someone here who is already in such a project.

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What sort of stuff are you interested in? We might be able to direct you to some specific projects if we had a few more specifics. "I want to hack on a C project" is a worthy goal, and one I pursued myself in my learning phase, but ultimately it's hard to really focus on anything without some guidance from yourself.

and any popular/interesting project would not be too thrilled with someone who's main reason to apply for a position as committer is "I want to hack on a C project".
Genuine interest in and knowledge about the problem domain is at least as important as technical knowhow.

And note that because a project is open-source doesn't mean it's good, doesn't mean the leader* is good or the code is good.

There are projects I've joined which I soon left because it was terribly hard to get anything done "their way" -- which according to the standards was "the wrong way"... or the stupid way.

* Without a good leader, or well-set goals and design the project is bound to fail. Just look at the zillions of abandon "MMORPG" (or whatever they are) floating around on the net, sure maybe not a good example -- but a fine one for my argument ;)

thanks for the replies.

I was thinking about something that already has parts working OK. I guess, many projects have not even reached that stage yet. I chose open source, cos I was expecting that it would be the most accessible to someone coming from outside - not necessarily out of any perceived quality

It may be the case, that open source coding project are as much due to the social phenomenon of people coming together with similar interests, as to sharing coding objectives and technical skills.

I was thinking of a small utility. CLI only
- my mp3 player's linux connection program
- a text utility in the line of wc.
- a small mp3 player

Anyhow, as I said before, I am looking for myself ... sourceforge ... that's a widely cast net, but yes, there and in several places.

Anyother suggestions welcome

Quote:

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Originally Posted by stabu

I was thinking of a small utility. CLI only
- my mp3 player's linux connection program
- a text utility in the line of wc.
- a small mp3 player

Anyhow, as I said before, I am looking for myself ... sourceforge ... that's a widely cast net, but yes, there and in several places.

Anyother suggestions welcome

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I wrote a program last year called "tvpl" which uses the ffmpeg library to decode video and play it on... a text terminal. It uses ncurses for color support. It actually plays movies pretty decently.

However, it doesn't play sound, and I didn't get around to several other things which would make the video look even better. It's also lacking minor features like automatically resizing the video playback when the terminal is resized.

Do you want to pick up this project and play with it?

(EDIT: It's a very small, hopefully non-intimidating program so it might be a good place to start.)

hi brewbuck,

I'd be happy to look at that ... though I view ncurses as being a GUI of sorts, and mplayer also plays on some text terminals.

do you have something up on line?

thanks for suggestion!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by stabu

hi brewbuck,

I'd be happy to look at that ... though I view ncurses as being a GUI of sorts, and mplayer also plays on some text terminals.

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I wouldn't call this particular app a GUI since it doesn't really accept any kind of input. You run it from the command line, it plays the movie. Also, last I checked mplayer only played in black and white, and it uses the 3rd party library AAlib. tvpl does color, albeit in a very limited palette. I think there's quite a few things you could play with.

Some possibilities:

* Implement more enhanced color. You can probably increase the effective resolution by using more types of glyphs. Or, sacrifice resolution in return for more colors by dithering.
* Implement sound
* Add some playback controls

It's only 620 lines so you probably can't get too lost in it.

Quote:

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do you have something up on line?

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http://codepsycho.org/brewbuck/tvpl-0.1.tar.gz

Anybody else who wants to play with it, feel free. The parts of it I wrote (i.e. most of it except for a function that pieces together partially decoded frames) are public domain.

You'll need to tweak the makefile slightly in order to link against your copy of ffmpeg.