Table of Contents
Documentation And Packages
There are two areas where Minix has some catching up to do: documentation and packages. They provide many small projects, for which not much prior knowledge of Minix is required, which provide a good way to get started with Minix development, and the results of which would be highly valuable to the Minix project.
If you want to contribute, please pick a package or man-page below, put your name behind it, and see whether you can fix it. Please take on only one project at a time, so as not to block others who want to work on these projects.
Thanks for your help!
Missing man-pages
Below is a list of man-pages that are missing. Only utility programs are listed currently, but functions of the MINIX API might be listed later. Please consult the source code when writing a man-page. Some utilities may have more, less, or different features than they do on other operating systems or in the POSIX specification. Make sure, however, that what is written in the man-page corresponds to the functionality in the version that is included in Minix.
| Man-page for | Person working on | Status |
|---|---|---|
| commands/devmand | ||
| commands/fix | Jacob Adams | Pull Request #41 |
| commands/rotate | Jacob Adams | Committed (0805ab8c) |
| commands/sprofalyze | Jacob Adams | Pull Request #70 |
| commands/sprofdiff | Jacob Adams | Pull Request #71 |
| commands/swifi | ||
| commands/writeisofs |
Process for the contribution of man-pages
Find a tool that's not documented or whose documentation could be improved Then just learn how it works and write the page. There are tons of examples in Minix already.
Just submit it as a standard pull request.
Make sure to put your manpage in the same folder as the tool it documents and set the MAN variable in the Makefile (see the Makefiles for tools with man pages for examples)
Don't forget to add your new page to distrib/sets/lists/minix-man/mi
Out of Date Wiki Pages
As minix grows and changes, the wiki pages that describe it also need to grow and change. To find pages that need updating, you can start by doing a search for “Stale” in the text. Find a page to work on, bring the page up to date, and then remove the stale page notice.
Packages
pkgsrc contains over 10,000 packages, but only a few thousand packages build and run out of the box on Minix. The goal is to get as many packages as possible working in Minix. A good way to get started is to try installing your favourite software, and fix any packages or dependencies that don't compile/work. There is a guide here for contributing to pkgsrc.
