Re: Helping on Git development

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 14, 2011, 23:14 UTC
Message-ID: <20110914231427.GA5611@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vehzjugdz.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:29:28AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> As to contributing to the project, right now, I think we have enough
> people who want to write code and documentation for Git, but what we lack
> are bandwidth to (this is not meant to be an exhaustive list):

Is there such a thing as enough coders? :)

Two things that got me started on git, and that I think are still relevant today:

  1. Scratch your own itch. Surely git doesn't do something that you
     wish it did. Or did it faster. Or whatever. Try to dig up past
     discussions on the list to make sure you're not doing something
     that has already been tried and rejected, and then start hacking.
     Your patches may be terrible at first, but I think there are people
     willing to guide you if you actually have running code.

  2. Read the list. People will report bugs. Try reproducing them,
     bisecting them, creating minimal test cases, narrowing the issues
     down to certain configurations or a certain bit of code, etc.
     Sometimes that will lead you to propose a solution. Sometimes
     you'll just add to the discussion, and then somebody with more
     familiarity can pick up the topic from there. But you'll have
     helped them by doing some of the work, and you'll have learned more
     about how git works.

-Peff