Re: Getting involved in meld development

[Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 28 August 2015 at 03:36, David Rabel <David Rabel noresoft com> wrote:

Hello everybody,

I'm using meld a lot and like it a lot. I'm a software developer and I
want to get involved in meld development to return something to the
community. Is there something like a point to start or easyhacks to get
into the code easier?

There wasn't! but there is now. I've just gone through to try and find easier bugs, and while I've come up fairly thin, I've marked a few things with the 'gnome-love' keyword:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&keywords=gnome-love%2C%20&keywords_type=allwords&list_id=57976&product=meld&query_format=advanced

As a general suggestion, it's probably worth picking a single subsystem (i.e., file, folder, version, or the app glue) and familiarising yourself with that. The code for file, folder and version control comparisons is quite distinct, and each has its own idiosyncrasies. In terms of what *not* to pick up, I'd suggest not looking at anything that involves the words 'encoding' or 'newline', unless you really like pain. I'm also in the middle of moving to using GtkSourceView's file loader and saver for our file handling, so anything that touches those areas isn't really worth checking out just yet.

There are quite a lot of bugs in the tracker that are there because they have a reasonable use case, but have no good UI, or no user-exposed ABI suggestions that I'd be happy to commit to. Often these are relatively simple from a coding point-of-view, but they need someone to come up with a plan and make a convincing argument that this is a good idea.

If you (or anyone else) would like to ask questions here, on bugzilla, or on private email about how to approach certain bugs or features, then I'll be as responsive as I can. Please, please do ask questions.

And btw, there is one feature that I really really miss in meld and
that's to collapse equal lines in file diff. (Or did I just not find out
how it works yet?)
I don't know if you want such a feature or not. But if so and after
getting to know the code a littler more I would love to work on
implementing something like this.

I'd be interested in seeing this. For me, the blocking issue for a feature like this is always going to be: how will this be exposed to the user? There's an old bug report asking for (I think) pretty much what you're suggesting (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664624) so maybe check that out in case it helps at all.

Also, some experience with GTK+ (as you mentioned in your other reply) is really nice to have. The vast majority of Meld's code requires GTK+ knowledge sooner or later, even if it's only to understand the text buffer model or the tree store.

cheers,

Kai