Re: Helping out

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 2/5/06, Thomas Thurman <thomas thurman org uk> wrote:
> Hi. I'm wondering whether and where I can help out with Metacity. I have
> reasonable C skills but only basic knowledge of how a window manager
> works (I'm learning a lot more by reading the source, though).
>
> So far, I've submitted patches to a couple of bugs that looked to be
> within my current capabilities (bug 313490, and bug 141425), but I was
> wondering whether I should go on looking generally for things I might be
> able to deal with, or whether there's some part of the program, or
> current development effort, I could maybe help out with to learn more.

Cool, thanks for the work and for be willing to look into doing more. 
I'd probably suggest a dual- or multi-track approach.  Definitely
spend time on any specific area that interests you, but also try to
pick off general bugs here and there that look doable.  Anyway, I tend
to be verbose but here's some long winded suggestions:

Some general suggestions:
  - Take a look at the HACKING and doc/code-overview.txt files in cvs
if you haven't done so already.  There may be other files worth
reading in doc/ depending on what area you are interested in working
on.
  - You may want to watch metacity bugs in general.  To do so, go to
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email, scroll down to the
bottom, and add metacity-maint gnome bugs to the comma separated list
of users to watch.  You can remove it later if you decide it's too
much email and you want to focus on specific stuff instead of trying
to learn more generally what's going on and how things work.

There are lots of relatively straightforward things you could pick off
that'd help you learn more.  Some examples (I'll pick out random bugs
from looking through the current list):
  - Trying to duplicate stuff; e.g. bug 330041 (which would be nice to
narrow down to the specific patch that caused it), bug 329940, or bug
140423 (though that might only have affected really old versions)
  - Fixing smaller scale or even easy stuff, e.g. bug 329413, bug
328920, bug 328211, bug 327543, bug 322059 (which I think we should
probably just store a GList containing just the workspace inside the
workspace and then return that in order to fix this), or bug 133896
(though it's possible Kjartan has already fixed all the stuff this bug
refers to).
  - Working on partially solved bugs that others abandoned due to lack
of interest or time (which are sometimes nice, because the partially
solution helps orient you to the code), e.g. bug 309567, bug 101659,
bug 151183, bug 306372 (no patch, but Havoc's comment describes the
necessary steps; this is probably the most common kind of this type,
despite the current list I found).

As for larger targetted stuff, there are lots of areas that you could
work on: drag & drop (involves more work on the gtk+ side), fixing
theme issues, focus issues, keybindings, compositor stuff, constraints
problems.  Let me know if any of those areas sound interesting to you
and I'll try to point you in the right direction.


Anyway, I've probably given you an information overload right now. 
Take a look at some of the stuff and see if any of it looks
interesting.  Feel free to ask questions.

Hope that helps,
Elijah