Doing a little bit of preparation maximizes your actual hands-on coding time. Here are few steps to get things started.

• Subscribe to Systers-dev – our public development mailing list

• Sign up for a launchpad account (if you already have one, Great!) - See: Create a Launchpad ID, be sure to upload your public key.

• Review how bzr works for distributed development - See: Bazaar in 5 minutes and Bazaar User Guide

Systers uses a distributed development model. Contributors have local repositories tied to personal project branches on launchpad that are tied to the Systers project. As new features become ready for server-side testing the project branches are merged into the development branch for testing and then once tests are passed moved to stable for rollout to production.

• Take a look at the Systers code on Launchpad Systers LP Repository

• Review the documentation on the Systers development process and current projects here systers_open-source_development_projects

• Decide on your development environment setup

Systers applies customizations on top of Mailman 2.1.10. The development environment needs to include generic Mailman 2.1.10 with the a specific development branch overlaid. Additionally, you need to use a specific version of Python and install Apache and Postgresql. You can do this in a few different ways:

• Set up a complete development environment on your local system using a virtual machine e.g. Virtual Box.*
• Sacrifice a partition or your entire system to the Systers Mailman development environment.

Specific step by step instruction may be be found here: step_by_step_system_installation. You should also review: getting_started.

• You can also do your development locally and then ask for testing time on the systers test server - abiwt.org.

• Other and better ideas accepted for development environment setup!

Additionally, if you are going to work on an item that does not involve Mailman code – you don't need the entire local setup.

And you can find us on irc at:

network: irc.freenode.net channel: #systers-dev

* If you come find Jennifer Redman at GHC09 on Wednesday or before the code sprint, she'll be able to provide you with a flash-drive that has a pre-installed image for Virtual Box.