[gcmd-dev] How I became maintainer of Gnome Commander and how it improved my live

[Uwe Scholz]

Hi!

First of all: Happy 2016 to all of you!

I planed this mail already a while ago. Hopefully it could be of
interest for some of you... :)



It's been nearly four years now that the old maintainer of Gnome
Commander (gcmd) passed away. Piotr did a great job in pushing this
software to a higher level. I have been using gcmd with pleasure for
many years. But up to two years ago I had never been a maintainer of any
FOSS project. So, how did it come that I am the new one? And what does
this mean to me now?

It began after an update of the gsf library, used by gcmd to get
meta-information out from structured files, e.g. zip files. After this
update, gcmd could not be started anymore. Even rebuilding and binding
didn't help: gcmd's source code had to be changed, too. On my local
Linux this was an easy task (there existed a patch already on bugzilla
and I used Gentoo those days). But what about the official package? It
seamed as nobody took care about it anymore. Now, that I have gotten so
much from the Open Source Community in the past decade from Linux, I
wanted to give something back.

Having repaired the broken mailing list configurations with a member
from the savannah.gnu.org team, we discussed some future options with
the members of the gcmd devel mailing list (Thanks Michael!). Thomas
Jost, the former website admin of gcmd pointed me to to some great
git-tutorials. These were important for me as I hadn't any experience in
collaborative development so far. After some mail-discussions with
Andrea Veri and Matthias Clasen (in which I pointed out my willingness
to take over the responsibility for gcmd) the status of a gnome
developer was given to me. After that I could directly push new
gcmd-releases to the servers of gnome.org. Meanwhile, Thomas created a
new GitHub organization, where the gcmd code could be found, too.

In the past two years quite a number of bugs could have been fixed and
here I also want to thank all the contributors, contributing with bug
fixes and helpful discussions in the mailing list. Amongst the bugs, the
most important certainly was #653573, resulting in plain-text connection
passwords in the config file. There are still many bugs on the todo
list, but currently no critical ones...

So, how did the maintainer status of gcmd changed my life? Up to one and
a half year ago I was doing my PhD in theoretical biophysics and I was
very disappointed about my work. I had realized that the scientific work
and its community is not the right place for me. But programming and
developing is something I really wanted to do. With gcmd a much bigger
world has opened to me: I started to love working with git, I tried much
more development tools than I had known ever before, I appreciate to
work with Gnome libraries and devhelp, I started using unit tests,
GitHub, Travis, etc... :)

And finally, the very very best: All this helped me to find a job in
which I can work as a C programmer (already more than a year ago), which
is so awesome! That's why I want to express my big gratitude to the
members of this mailing list, the gnome community and all those who have
made the gcmd project possible.

Although I have not so much time as before this job, I still will
contribute further to gcmd. :)

I wish you all the best!
Uwe