Contribute Howto.
-----------------

This document is intended for all the people who want to contribute to
this project, and don't know how to get started.

First of all, you can start by patching this documents, english is not
my primary lenguage, and I don't have enough time to spend around
fixing typos and such errors.

Beta-testing.
-------------
The best way you could help out the project, is to beta test our
product. Please take into consideration that this is _not_ an official
release, but it is a distribution that is in a heavy development
stage.  Please don't use it on production servers. It is very likely
that you would have to re-download packages in a daily basis; it is
also probable that you will find things on a very disfuctional stage;
it is posible that you get unexpected crashes at any time. But your
work and feedback is _very_ important for us. I only have about 5
diferent types of Sun's and a limited hardware to test all of the
bootdisks and packages.

As mentioned on other documents, this project is based on the work
that was being held by David Cantrell when he was developing Slackware
for sparc. The work David left is very stable and functional. The
whole proyect, is based on the feeling that what he was doing was just
too good, an that it's a shame that he had to stop it. We hope not to
mess things up, but to improve them, so if you trust on the stability
of David's work, I hope that you will trust on our's.

Package contribution
--------------------
A _lot_ of packages have to be recompiled and upgraded. If you want to
help with this, you have to install a _clean_, _current_ version of
the distribution; grab slackware sources, adjust the Slackbuild to
compile and function properly with our distribution. Send in any
scripts, or patches that you would like to contribute. Only "source"
submissions are accepted at this time.

"Social" work
-------------
One of the reasons why there are so many untested and unheard distributions
out there, is probably because people like to use distributions that has
name and reputation. I would personally won't like when people ditch Splack
just because they see our work as Just Another Distribution, and not as a
serius contribution to the Slackware and Sparc comunities. This is one of
the things that I think will be hard to acomplish. To get a "name" that
would make people trust this distribution. 

There are a number of ways how you could perform "Social" work. To get the
aproval of the media is one of them. To get the aproval of potential
users and developers, is another. But to get the aproval and the interest
of the Slackware Team, is probably one of the hardest.

BTW, try not to spam the Slackware team, because that would surelly give
a negative turn on this matter.

"Brain" work
------------
If you do not own a Sparc, you would surelly have a hard time
compiling packages for the distribution, and specially installing it
;).  But we have a lot of decisions to make. The two firts, were the
naming scheme, and the package tool that we would use for our
distribution. Topics like this are treated at our mailing lists at
SourceForge, the Slackware for Sparc forum at the Slackware web site.
It is very important that current Slackware users agree on our decisions.
This is a little bit of the "Social" work I mentioned before :).

Mirroring Splack
----------------
We hope that Splack Linux gets to be a major thing, so a lot of people
would be interested in downloading it. The bandwith that
ftp.ulatina.ac.cr currently has is _way too short_ for this
purpose. If you would like to mirror Splack Linux, you could rsync to
sourceforge. Then let us know to update the MIRRORS.TXT file, adding
your contribution on it.


Contacting the Splack Team
--------------------------

You can use the mailing lists assigned to the Splack project at
sourceforge.net (http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=31547); you can
contact us at the irc channel at irc.freenode.net, port 6667, channel
#splack.

Or, you can contact me directly. See the bottom of this document.

The Splack Team would like to thank anyone that could give us _any_ type of
help. We apreciate your contributions. ;)

--
Alvaro Figueroa C.
(fede2@fuerzag.ulatina.ac.cr)