On Fri, 31 Dec 2004, Felix Rabe wrote:
Hi Bryce,
It's a shame that I only saw your calls for volunteer work now that you replied to them yourself... But I think this is an excellent idea to invite new developers! There needs to be more of it, or maybe it just needs to be more visible (like with a tag in the subject, eg. "[CFV]" for "Call For Volunteers").
Ah, thanks. I'll continue looking for appropriate projects for volunteers and help identify them for folks.
In fact, I was looking for an easy way to familiarize myself with existing (poorly or barely documented) code bases and came up with this (as yet sadly unimplemented) idea: Look for a bug that has been fixed sometime in CVS and get a diff for the fix.
Yup. Another way I've found helpful in learning barely documented codebases is to start by just documenting code. I've learned large swatches of Inkscape code by going through files and writing comments (as best I can) for each function in the file.
Also, right now is a *perfect* time for new developers to get involved in bug fixing, because right now we've got a huge wealth of new bugs reported since the last release. Over the coming weeks, as bug fixing becomes intensive, easy-to-fix bugs are going to get ferretted out and fixed. But right now those are all siting there ripe for the taking. :-)
I'll give you a secret for bug fixing - the *easiest* bug fixes to work on are usually the ones that cause crashes. This is because you can run gdb on them and get a backtrace. That tells you *exactly* where in the codebase the crash occurred, and usually you can figure those out easily (it's usually some form of naughty pointer). You can fix 2-3 such bugs per evening without too much trouble.
I think it might be another good invitation and might add value to code documentation if some good (ie. easy) fixes and enhancements were pointed out in the Wiki by the developers that commited them to CVS or by the newbies that found the diffs and found them to be straightforward.
If I someday get to implement this idea, should I start a Wiki page? (This might take a few months though...) Or is somebody else willing to do it? Or is it a not-so-god (bad) idea altogether?
Sounds worth having a shot at, so yeah, start a wikipage on it when you're ready and we can see how it goes. :-)
Bryce