Getting Involved with BLFS

A common question on the mailing lists is: "How do I get involved?". Therefore, we wrote this page to try and answer that question.

The first thing which we suggest you do is to subscribe to the blfs-book and blfs-dev mailing lists. blfs-dev contains discussion on the book while blfs-book recieves information on all commits and ticket traffic associated with BLFS.

You need to install SVN on your computer to really be able to help out with BLFS. Naturally, the best way to do this is by following the instructions in the BLFS book itself! You can then check out the XML source to the book using the following commands:

The procedure above will get the BLFS tree. When you wish to update your tree, simply do:

while in the BLFS directory.

Information on converting the book from XML into HTML format can be found in the INSTALL and README files. You will need to install libxslt, DocBook XSL Stylesheets, tidy (optional for html), lynx (for text), JDK-1.5 (for pdf), FOP (for pdf) for this to work. Full information is in the INSTALL file.

Once you have familiarised yourself with the book layout, have a look at our ticket system.

Finally, have fun and get involved with discussions on the lists. Try emailing blfs-dev (for book issues) or blfs-suport (for build issues) when you have problems as the BLFS team read those lists regularly. Once you have something which you wish to submit, create a diff file (preferably using diff -Naur) and submit it to the blfs-dev list where one of the editors will pick it up. For more details about how to update the BLFS book, take a look at the BLFS Editors' Guide.