Knowing how best to contribute is the hard part…
BK said some time ago that puppy is a
doocracy and this is true for many volunteer projects.
Is almost impossible for anyone to tell someone else what to do. At best (s)he can ask. Nicely…
To make it easy to the user public, we need to support a common puppy. My take is that a variety of slack*, Ubunt*, Deb*, etc won't cut it.
I can appreciate that "one puppy that fits all" would be nice but this ended after 4.x and the person that ended it 6 years ago was
BK himself with woof.
As it developed, puppy indeed had 3 main flavors, the mainstream LTS releases based on Ubuntu LTS (Lucid and Precise are still supported and updated…), the "cutting-edge" based on Slackware and the one for "older hardware", build from T2/puppy.
Currently there are only 2 going on, the ones based on Ubuntu and Slackware.
They are not really many!
Regarding the desktops (LXpup, XFCE-pup), heck even ubuntu offers spinoffs with different desktops, why not Puppy. Sure they could become just an additional sfs on the said puppy (say an adrv) but I hardly see the confusion if it is clear that they are (mostly) different desktops of the given puppy. A puppy home page could help a lot on that
Unfortunately the only people who understand enough about woof and can keep the public face of Puppy true to the BK definitions are those developers (eg currently on git) who are unfortunately already busy enough.
Coming to the PR section, this was historically on the shoulders of the puppy builder not the developer/contributor. BK, Micko, playdayz or jamesbond promote their puppies/distros as builders ("release manager" in big distros) not developers.
People contributing in woof-CE should not be expected to do any of these unless they release a puppy. And they do (thus my position about often releases). Micko and slacko 5.7 was the last one.
However, puppy does need a good "public entry" page that will guide newcomers and show that the project is going on.
What this needs is someone(s) that follow what's happening in pup word, can write on a webpage template and modify/create a webpage template as needed.
I can see many people around capable of the first 2(…
) if they can also use seamonkey's composer, should be able to do it with some effort.
Mind you this needs a totally different set of skills than of a puppy developer (BK's web pages are a proof of that
)
So the
Puppy PR department is now hiring
A web page designer
A home page editor
A puppy news consolidator
A creative technical writer
A marketing expert
Person with more that one of the above qualities are very welcome
No previous experience is required
Successful applicants will be given 5 good karma point per page and a commendation for every 6 months tenure
More info
here (alternative approaches are also welcome)