11 Feb 2015

Squashed?

Choosing an issue

This is largely a re-iteration of what I discussed in a previous blog post. So I’ll just do a brief overview of what was said there and then mention updates since then.

I choose my issue based on approachability and necessity. As mentioned in Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar:

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.

I find this holds true for more than just software. I initially considered Issue #903 because it was something I ran into immediately while trying to get set up with the project. It was already somewhat personal, and I didn’t want anyone else to have the same problem.

It was a simple enough fix, and I already had comprehension of how to solve it. Before starting I went ahead and threw a comment on the issue to ensure that it was alright for me to just start typing away. And so it was!

Submitting a fix

The reply to my comment was a positive:

Happy to merge such a change improving the documentation :-)

So, I went ahead with my changes. After creating my own fork and following the contribution instructions I took a moment to get used to the style used in the documentation and the formatting of restructured text (I was used to markdown).

Once the changes were made I committed and pushed to my branch and created a pull request.

After about a day Jodal (project leader) added the pull request to the milestones v0.20 - Audio Cleanup and v0.19.6 - Bug fixes.

Four days later Jodal commented:

Thanks!

I tweaked the text a bit and rewrapped the lines to a maxium length of 80 chars. It’s almost impossible to make a docs change I won’t tweak a bit ;-)

and merged it into the main project.

Experience thus far

The contributers on the project have been extremely friendly, eager to have more people work with them, and very organized. It’s been very pleasant to work on this project (even though we haven’t done much significant as of yet). I have pretty high hopes for the remainder of the semester and I hope that we can get several more bug fixes done and get started working on a feature.

Laura Barber at 1:45PM