Chapter 10. Helping
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# Chapter 10. Helping

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

—Bertrand Russell

FreeTDS is a cooperative, volunteer effort. Flame wars on the list are unknown and the signal to noise ratio is pretty high for its venue. Many people have contributed patches, and few have been turned away.

## Pick a weak spot and fix it.

- We don't have enough non-English speakers to test our character set conversion features. Anyone willing to participate in that way would be most welcome.

- Canonical examples of using the each library would be very helpful to newcomers.

- An isql Perl and PHP would all make debugging and testing easier for everyone.

### Send a patch

Good patches are nearly always applied in short order. Patches uploaded to SourceForge trigger automatic notification to the FreeTDS mailing list.

### Correct this User Guide

Any corrections or suggestions, be they typographical, grammatical, structural, factual, or mineral are most welcome. Please send it to the FreeTDS mailing list.

The User Guide is maintained in XML DocBook format; the file in your distibution is `doc/userguide.xml`. It is a flat ASCII file that you can edit with any text editor. You don't have to know XML to correct or add to the User Guide, however. Just open it up, find the place you're interested in, and type away. Do a diff -u `old_version` `your_version` and post your patch to the SourceForge site. Any errors or lackings in your markup will be graciously emended by yours truly.

### Document an API

We have just begun an independent reference manual to FreeTDS; the main API documents are the work of the server vendors. We're using Doxygen, which extracts documentation directly from comments in the source code, and we're maybe 25% done.

The TDS protocol is partly documented, as are the APIs to `libtds` and `DB-Library`, but much remains.

### Be the Webmaster

The FAQ and in particular the news don't get updated often enough. If that's your thing, drop a line to the FreeTDS mailing list.

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