Re: Getting started contributing.

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Feb 3, 2013, 13:02 UTC
Message-ID: <77A6ABB842334FFFA04970DEAFAB6D0D@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <7vd2whalax.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2013 7:49 AM

Show 30 quoted lines

> adamfraser <adamfraser0@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I've done a little searching and
>> haven't been able to find an official bug tracker for git is there 
>> somewhere
>> I can find some bugs to help fix?
>
> You came to the right place.  A new bug or regression is reported to
> this list, and it often is fixed (or often diagnosed as pebcak)
> fairly quickly by list regulars.  Nobody maintains a bugzilla that
> is not maintained and is full of stale/invalid bug reports.
>
> The best contribution a new person can make is to use the software
> regularly and find issues.  It is very hard to find real bugs that
> can easily be fixed by somebody totally new to the codebase in Git
> these days.
>
> On the other hand, there probably still are many loose ends.  When a
> command is supposed to take only two arguments because taking more
> than three does not make any sense, for example, it has not been
> unusual for us to document the two-argument form of the command,
> reject if the user gives only one argument with an error message,
> but we simply ignore the third argument if the user mistakenly runs
> the command with three arguments, instead of erroring out (i.e. the
> code does not bother to help insane or too inexperienced users).
> That kind of things are hard to find by users experienced with Git
> exactly because they know running such a command with three or more
> arguments is nonsense, and they do not even try to make such a
> mistake.  Still, it would be very nice to find and fix such issues.
>

A review of the git-user list https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/git-users is one place to discover some of the user issues and thinking about how to address them. Or resurrect issues from this Git list. E.g. There are a number of sub-module improvements available there.

If you have any Windows experience the MSysGit team https://github.com/msysgit/msysgit is always looking for help on some of the compatibility issues, e.g. where the Linux optimisations conflict with the Windows approaches.

Another area is picking out documentation issues you have seen and submitting patches for them, whether in the command man pages or in the guides. On my 'todo' list is to make the `help` command actually list the "Help me" (i.e. guides and articles) pages, not just the command man pages.

I also had -
* Bulk move detection (when folk change/move upper level directory 
names).
* add a .gitnevermerge option to stop private files you don't want in 
'master' (or any other branch) to be merged

Philip