I would like to contribute to XFCE

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hi,

On Sat, 23 Feb 2013 13:21:11 +0100
Ondřej Kulatý <kulaty.o at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> I am currently studying at university and this semester we have
> subject called "Open source programming". One of the assignments in
> this subject it to get in touch with open source community and try to
> contribute some open source project. I have choosen XFCE since it's my
> favorite DE and I am currently using it on my Linux box. This will be
> my first contribution to open source software. I have some experience
> with C language, but no experience with other libraries used in XFCE,
> like GTK etc.

I think you made a good choice - Xfce covers various technical areas
while still having a manageable amount of components and code.

> Subject of participation
> -----------------------------
> Fixing some small bug(s) from bugzilla would be good start for me,
> what do you think? I don't want to do nothing big, since I am not yet
> familiar with XFCE code, used libraries etc.

What's best in my opinion is to start with smaller issues that you
notice yourself and that you'd like to see fixed. But of course you are
free to pick any of the bugs reported in bugzilla. I'd recommend
looking at the more recent bugs because the older ones are not always
up to date or valid any more.

But yes, small bugs are generally better than big features because
the risk of failing is lower.

> Workflow
> -----------
> I have already explored some bugs in bugzilla in order to understand
> how this works. Correct me if I am wrong.
> I will first choose a bug I want to fix (Do I need to ask somebody? Or
> is it enough to write comment on bug page? Do I need to be assigned to
> this bug?).

I think it's worth collecting a few bugs that you're interested in
working on and sending a mail to the list, asking about whether they
are still valid and how hard they are to fix. That might help in
picking something that sounds doable but is actually very hard or
involves a lot of changes.

You can add comments to the bugs to start a discussion on possible ways
to fix them etc. They don't have to be assigned to you but I guess we
could do that if you want to take that responsibility.

> Then I will download latest version of source code from
> GIT and try to find and fix that bug. After that I will create patch
> and submit it as comment on page of the bug.

Sounds good so far. :)

> Will anybody test my fix and will I receive any feedback from
> developers regarding my patch (if it's OK, if I am doing something
> wrong etc...) ? If the fix will be OK, will it ever be merged in some
> release?

Yeah, somebody, .i.e., one of the developers will take the patch, review
and test it and ideally commit it to Git. And once that's happened,
it'll be included in the next release. We also occasionally backport
fixes to older/stable versions.

In any case, you'll get feedback on your patches, you may have to rework
them, and once it's good, it'll be included.

Note: we may be unresponsive, so make sure to poke us enough (e.g. on
IRC) if you don't get feedback within a reasonable amount of time. ;)

Good luck!

  - Jannis