ProteanOS needs more contributors! If you're interested in getting involved, please contact us on the IRC channel and/or mailing list.
There are a variety of ways in which you can help shape the future of this operating system distribution:
Software Packaging
Packaging is the preparation of build instructions and metadata for software programs and libraries to be built and installed on users' systems.
Source packages have a documented format, and tutorials on packaging are available.
There is always more software to be packaged (including Perl 5 with cross building support), and one package needs to be updated to the latest package format. 15 packages prepared by a team of students in the spring 2015 NJIT CCS Capstone program need to be reviewed for uploading to the package archive.
But the work doesn't end after a package is prepared and uploaded; maintaining existing packages is also important and neverending work. ProteanOS currently has 94 source packages (388 binary packages) in its package archive (with more not yet uploaded). Many of these have newer upstream versions and can be updated. Some have patches that can be dropped when updating to a newer upstream version. Some others (e.g. the toolchain packages) have patches that may be of interest outside ProteanOS but have not yet been submitted upstream.
Most source packages are maintained in Git repositories. You can
request a repository for your package on the mailing list. To
make changes to a package, it is recommended that you send patches to the
mailing list and the maintainer listed in the package's
control file. If you would like to become a co-maintainer or take over
maintenance of a package, you should coordinate with the listed maintainer (if
reachable) and the mailing list to gain commit rights to the
package's Git repository.
Software Development
The ProteanOS community maintains and uses a number of distribution development and infrastructure tools, including the ProteanOS Development Kit, opkbuild, opkhelper, the ProteanOS Archive Manager, and the Text::MarkdownBook Perl library. Bug reports, feature suggestions, and patches are welcome.
A simple build daemon infrastructure has been designed.
Technical Documentation
Specifications
In development is the Source Package Format 2.0 specification.
Instructions to clone and build the specifications are available.
Policies
To be written is a Packaging Policy.
Release Series
ProteanOS is released in series. Development is currently focused on release series 1.
See the list of remaining tasks for ProteanOS 1.0.
Architecture Ports
ProteanOS is designed to portable to many different hardware architectures, system kernels, and C/C++ libraries. A number of ports are planned.