review flag; contributing patches

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

We've had a few people contributing patches for the Miro codebase. I decided it was time to add a review flag like Mozilla has in their Bugzilla instance. This makes it easier for us to keep track of attachments that are waiting on reviews.

As such, I added a "review" flag to our Bugzilla instance for attachments.

I thought I'd talk a little bit about contributing patches.

Guess what? You're a happy Miro user except for one little thing that really annoys you. You head on up to the Miro Bugzilla bug-tracker to see if this is a bug/feature that someone else has reported already. Wow--turns out it has been reported. Not only that, but there's been some analysis done and some speculation as to a good attack vector for fixing the problem.

So you roll up your sleeves, add a comment on the bug stating you're going to work on it, set yourself as "assigned", dust off your favorite editor, skim through the Miro development wiki for the svn repository information and build instructions, and get to work.

A few hours later you've got it working on your machine. You run:

svn diff > bugid.patch

to generate a .patch file containing the changes you've made.

You visit the bug in the Miro Bugzilla bug-tracker, find the bug you were working on, and click on "add attachment". You'll see the following screen:

/images/reviewflag.thumbnail.png

The "Add attachment" page.

Deftly, you upload the patch, click on the "patch" checkbox, select "?" from the Review flag dropdown and type in will.guaraldi@pculture.org in the Requestee box.

Then you press the "submit" button!

Will (that's me) gets an email stating that there's an attachment waiting for review. I add it to my queue of things to look into. If it's not something I know anything about, I'll find someone else who can look at it. Then someone will add a comment to the bug reviewing the patch and ... the rest is iterations on that.

If you're interested in helping out, we've been tagging bugs that we think are good for people new to the codebase as "bitesized". You can see a list of them here.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.