As I'm progressing my first steps in hacking tahoe-lafs I thought it might help others and this is what you're reading now. Be bold editing and improving this doc, since I'm not even familiar with Python and lots of you can document your own 'best practices' for other newbies.

I will use Eclipse IDE because of wide use and availability. But just because I'm used to it. You might have your preferred tools. I'm on Ubuntu.

1. Set up your OS. (I tinker a lot with mine so I maybe miss some). You have to ​install python in your OS for tahoe to run. Most Linux distributions have it in their software repositories.

2. tahoe-lafs source code is hosted on darcs repositories. Get darcs running in your machine. For Ubuntu just do this from a shell: sudo apt-get install darcs

3. Get the code from the main repo this way

4. IDE: Install ​Eclipse + ​PyDev in your platform. You can start from a "classical" Eclipse install and add the "Software sites" URL ​http://pydev.org/updates. You can then go to 'Install new software' menu item and add PyDev? from there.

(to be continued...)

5. (ToDo?) Run the tests

6. ...