Hey folks! It’s spooky season, so you know what that means. It’s time for Hacktoberfest 2024! This is the annual event that “encourages people to contribute to open source throughout October”, in exchange for rewards.

This year we have two main goals. First, as always, we want to support anyone looking to get involved in open source contributions, or helping Solus specifically. We would love to add people to our packaging team.

Second, there’s been a big push recently to clean up and update our package repository, and we can use your help. Much of this work currently involves adding home pages to packages, making sure they build, fixing them if they don’t, and adding monitoring information. Related, we would like to field test and improve our “autobuild” tool.

Read on for ways to participate.

What do I get out of it?

Hacktoberfest is a great way to get started contributing to a project, or open source in general. You can make contacts in different projects, get mentoring, and practice your skills. You’ll also get cool badges.

What if I’m not a developer?

Developers aren’t the only contributors in the open source community. We also have people who write documentation, people who submit and triage bugs, and people who do communications and outreach. Your submission to a project does not have to be code.

OK so how do I get involved? And who can help me if I need it?

• Register on the Hacktoberfest website
• Read up on what it is and how to participate
• Check out our docs on packaging
• Join our Matrix space, we use the Solus Packaging room to discuss packaging work.
• Find something(s) to work on

  • For development / bug triage: look in the Solus Packages repository

  • We also need help with some issues in our Help Center repository

    Anything labeled “Hacktoberfest”, “Good First Issue”, “Package Request” or “Help Wanted” is a good candidate for new folks (but don’t feel limited to them)

• Do work and create pull requests in the Solus repositories
• At least four of your PRs / MRs need to be accepted and merged (across any and all projects which are participating) for you to complete Hacktoberfest

Good luck, everyone and happy hacking!