I am a retired software engineer with 36 years of experience. Primarily C/C++ on Linux and Windows. Need any help developing Duplicati? How do I sign up? I can fwd a fairly recent Resume’ if you want it. I am just looking for part time work to keep my mind occupied during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Create an account on Github (if you don’t have one), fork the Duplicati project, and have at it! If you make some changes that you’d like to share, you can create a pull request and the core developers will evaluate for inclusion in the main project.
The Issues section shows the current bugs/feature requests.
Thank you for your interest in helping this project!
Thanks for replying so quickly.
Sure. That’s great. I have an account of github and I will take a look at the code, and setup a development environment. A question (and perhaps it is a stupid one): can I build duplicati on an z86_64 (i7) Win10 laptop? I do not have a Linux workstation.
Is there a ‘project leader’ that understands the current priorities and directions of the project? Or, is there someone who would be able to show me the ropes? Is there a list of simple bugs to fix for a newb to start on?
Thanks again for getting back to me. And, btw, the current state of Duplicati looks really neat - having only a few days of experience with it.
Yes, you can definitely build it on a Windows 10 machine. I personally use Visual Studio 2019 Community edition. It has nice integration with Github. When you start VS you can tell it to clone a repository. Point it to your forked version of the Duplicati project, not the main Duplicati project. (This is because you cannot commit code directly to the main project. You have to commit code to your fork and then you can do a pull request from there.) If you’re new to git then you may want to read some documentation on how it works: branches, pull requests, etc.
Check out the Issues area and poke around at the bugs there. See if anything looks interesting to you that you’d like to tackle and go for it.
I retired in Dec. 2019 from a Linux/Windows development group, and git and github was used extensively.
Can you please point me to any documents describing getting started with development of Duplicati? Simple example recipes are most helpful to me.
Looking forward to helping out.
I don’t know if there is such documentation. I know there have been some good developer discussions in the Developer category of this forum.
Maybe someone else is aware of some documentation. I only submit small code changes occasionally… I’m definitely not a core developer.
Recipes for what? There’s a bit of technical documentation in the GitHub wiki and in the user manual.
How the backup process works
How the restore process works
Forum and GitHub are searchable. Finding information on specific topics can be done by search, and searching with search engines such as Google sometimes is more capable than the web site can do.
For generic technology recipes, e.g. C#, SQL, etc., searching can help you find such info on the web.
For specific Duplicati issues, sometimes searching can find similar issues that may have further info.
I’m not really a Duplicati developer myself, but I can read the code well enough to troubleshoot issues. Answering questions (or watching answers) on the forum is also a good way to learn and help others.
There’s a recipe here for troubleshooting from messages that people report (even if not given in English).
Releases are not your worry after the PR is accepted, but it’s a series of Canary, then eventually a Beta with an Experimental just before, in the hope of detecting/solving upgrade bugs of infrequent upgrades.
GitHub use is extremely basic, maybe about to get overly basic with a big move to .NET 5 in progress…
The source control and release management challenge is to put out the new code at a good quality level.
Duplicati User’s Manual is its own project, and maintainer is asking that changes be done by pull request.