First note that there is no mailing list, no bug tracker and
no discussion forum for any of the projects. Also, the author is
no member of any social networks. To contact him, send email to
maan@tuebingen.mpg.de.
Here is a list of things you can do:
These pages are hard to find. Search engines don't list them on the first page of hits unless you search for the exact name of the project. You can help to make the projects more popular by posting about them on your blog or on social networks.
Point out unclear or poorly written parts of the manual, the web pages or the source code documentation. The author is not a native English speaker. If you are, you will easily find text that could be improved.
If you have trouble with building, installing or running a particular software package, contact the author. Since the code is only tested on a limited set of systems (Ubuntu and Debian Linux, and for some projects also NetBSD and FreeBSD), you will probably encounter problems when building on different systems.
Tools like coverity, afl or sparse are not run regularly on any of the source code repositories, so these tools will likely find issues. Even if you can't fix an issue yourself, it is still valuable to report it.
For most software projects listed here, only the source code is available via git repositories. Building and installing a program from the source code constitutes a substantial barrier for unexperienced users. Hence the software becomes available to a larger audience if you provide pre-compiled binary packages for your favorite distribution.
If you would like to see new features implemented, contact the author to explore what could be implemented, and how.
While this does not directly improve the projects, it helps to keep the author motivated to continue developing and to publish more of his (many) non-public projects. It should be easy to figure out the author's postal address from his email address. Hint: It's a research institute in Germany.
Send an envelope which contains a second envelope that is addressed back to you and which is suitably stamped. Leave a note which says which of the projects you like and you'll receive a fusible cutout for ironing on a T-Shirt or any other piece of fabric. Click here to see how it looks like.
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