04 Feb 2015

Bug Juice

Discussing bugs

My group has been discussing what bugs we want to work on since we decided on our project. We’ve be focusing on trying to identify an issue that is approachable but will give us a good introduction to the project. Most of the documentation issues fall under this category of approachability. However we were also interested in developing a feature: Pandora support for Mopidy. This has already been discussed somewhat in Issue #712.

While investigating this feature we discovered that Mopdiy lacks dynamic playlist support Issue #620, mostly preventing a solution from being made.

I also found it interesting that not many people were interested in adding Pandora support given it’s geolocation dependency. Jodal, the project leader stated in #712:

As Pandora isn’t available in Norway, I’m not very interested in working on the Pandora support myself, and would prefer it if someone actually using Pandora created and maintained an extension for it.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself a bit. This is a potential future goal of the group.

Choosing a bug

As mentioned before I wanted something easy to tackle, after perusing through the list of bugs that my group discussed I decided to start with Issue #903. I ran into this issue when I initially looked at the project, to me it wasn’t clear where to go for instructions regarding installation via git. I said as much in this issue.

Submitting a fix

The major contributors to the project seem very open to fixes. So, I went ahead and made some small documentation changes that will hopefully clear up the issue discussed.

In order to make these changes I first needed to fork the project and create a branch, per the contribution instructions.

Easy enough, my fork and branch are now located here. Now I was ready to make the changes. Nothing big, I just made a few additions, changed some of the language and made a link to another portion of the documentation that had instructions on installing Mopidy with git.

Once I felt I’d changed enough I committed my code, pushed to my branch and created a pull request. Once my request was out there a few automated tests were run to ensure that nothing in my branch would break the existing code base. Of course these all passed since I only made documentation changes.

As of now, it’s awaiting review by the project collaborators.

Laura Barber at 3:01PM