Attn Thue: I wanna write Freeciv code!

[Seneca]

I've been browsing through the source and looking at the TODO list, but I'm still not sure about the best way to get my feet wet.

How do new developers normally get initiated - do they just send patches out of the blue, or get given something to do, or what?

I've got 20 months professional C/Linux experience, 4 years C in total - reckon that will be enough?

[Thue]

Normally you just write code and then submit it. But there is already a number of patches that needs to be commited to CVS (read: a maintainer with write access need to take responsibility for reading, testing and checking them), so I will not garantie that any feature patches will be commited.

Bug fixes get to the front of the patch queue, so that would be a good starting point... I starting freeciv programming by fixing bugs, and tracing through the code to fix them gave good insight into the code . Take a look at the bug tracking system if you want to try this.

Something slightly boring, but something that needs to be done, would be a security audit. Simply checking all means of input from the network.