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How to contribute to Xfce
Xfce is developed by a small group of hard-working volunteers. There are many ways in which you can contribute to Xfce, all of which are most welcome!
For a more in-depth look at how to contribute to Xfce, it is recommended to read The Ultimate Contributor's Guide to Xfce for additional helpful information.
If you would like to donate to Xfce, please see the Donations section.
Bug Reporting and Testing
One of the most useful tasks that we rely on the community for is testing and reporting of bugs, you can report bugs on the Xfce GitLab site, the Xfce-bugs mailing list, or you can ask on our IRC channel #xfce on Freenode for help. Please do not use the forums to report bugs. Before submitting a bug, please try your best to check if it has already been reported. When writing your bug report, try to be as descriptive as possible, but avoid verbosity; Mozilla has a nice guide on how to write a bug report. For more information, see Bug Reporting and Fixing.
Communication
There are various ways to get in touch with Xfce developers:
- For general questions, Xfce's Forum, the Xfce mailing list, and our IRC channel #xfce on Freenode are the places to go.
- For any translation stuff, join the Xfce-i18n mailing list.
- For anything code related, go to the Xfce-dev mailing list, or our IRC channel #xfce-dev on Freenode.
All Xfce developers have a real life and live across multiple time zones. If you don't get an answer straight away, be patient and stay online!
Development
See the Xfce Development Information page for details on getting a contributor's account, working with Git and Xfce source code, and instructions for making releases. As well check the Xfce Wiki more development hints, tips and tricks.
Documentation
The Xfce Wiki and Documentation contain many helpful pages that require maintaining and updating with every new release. The wiki is freely available for anyone to edit, refer here for information on how to contribute to the documentation.
Donations
If you wish to donate to Xfce, you can do so via Xfce’s Bountysource page. You can freely donate to the organization itself, or offer a reward to fix a specific bug. Every donation is greatly appreciated, but please remember, this is an open source project that is 100% run by volunteers, no one is implicitly obliged to act upon your requests.
Feature Requests
Although the philosophy of Xfce is to find the correct balance between features and lightweight, it is still possible to request new features.
The right approach for larger changes is to discuss them on the mailing list, or on our IRC channel #xfce-dev on Freenode first. You might think your idea is brilliant, but there is a high possibility that there are major downsides.
Afterwards a bug can be opened in the bug tracker. Make sure the Importance is set to normal and enhancement.
Obviously, it would be nice if you could write a patch that implements the new feature.
Translation
Applications, manuals, documentation and many other aspects of Xfce are all translated into different languages. Translations are handled in Transifex, a web-based translation platform. Visit the translation docs to get started with translating.