From: Eric Frederickson Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2025 01:22:49 GMT Subject: Re: A Question from a Hopeful Future Contributor Message-ID: <87zfczodue.fsf@arch.mail-host-address-is-not-set> In-Reply-To: "brian m. carlson" writes: > On 2025-07-18 at 22:26:31, Eric Frederickson wrote: >> Hello everyone, > > Hi, > >> I hope that this message finds you well! I'm a software developer and passionate >> git user, and I'd like to try my hand at contributing to the project. I'm >> sending this message in order to ask Junio and the team if there's anything that >> would be particularly useful / appropriate for me to start looking into on that >> front. (Reading through the last few "What's cooking" messages, I didn't see >> anything that jumped out at me as needing a new contributor, which is why I'm >> asking in a separate message instead of replying to one of those.) > > It's great to hear that you want to contribute. Thank you for your welcoming response :). Excited for the journey! >> (Some notes on my skills: working on docs or tests is always a favorite for me, >> so things in those areas would be a great time. Also comfortable with low-level >> code, and any kind of scripting. Note too that academic background centers >> around programming language design and parsing related stuff, so I've got some >> fluency in those areas that I could hopefully apply well to the project if ever >> needed.) > > We have a Git FAQ because I answered questions on Stack Overflow and got > tired of answering the same question again and again, so if you want to > add any common problems there, that's of course welcome. Noted. > (Now, to be clear, people did not stop asking those questions, but I had > prepared text and a link to provide to them, and then people _knew_ that we > had a FAQ and could refer to it.) If there's anything that you think is poorly > documented and colleagues or people online have trouble with, we would > absolutely love for that documentation to be improved. Sounds good. Would love to submit some patches to this effect at some point. > One thing I did to get started some years ago is to grep through the > codebase for TODO statements and to pick something that seemed simple > enough to do, and then send a patch. > > If there are small functions that you think would benefit from unit > tests, we now have the framework for that that we lacked until recently. > > If you see things in the tests marked test_expect_failure, then that > means that's a TODO test: it should pass, but it presently does not, and > that can sometimes be a source of good things to work on. Some of those > things are kind of big (especially a lot of the submodule TODOs), but > sometimes they're small and approachable. This was very helpful to learn! I've been looking through them, and have found a pair that's drawn my eye: the pair of known breakages in: t3903-stash, tests 52 and 53 ("stash directory to file" and "stash file to directory"). From some introductory exploration, it seems that that bug in git-stash that's causing those breakages could also be causing the breakages in: t2500-untracked-overwriting, tests 7 and 8 ("git rebase --autostash and untracked files" and "git stash and untracked files") So, a fix for the t3903 failures might net us a 4-for-2 deal. I've been looking through the "git stash apply" source code and I think I've at least got a lead on this. Will continue investigating, and hopefully I'll eventually end up with a patch to send! > Hopefully one of these options bears fruit for you, and please don't get > discouraged if you wander into something that ends up being very > complicated at first. Got it. Hopefully the one I'm choosing here is one of the lucky picks. :) > We have lots of those in our codebase and with time, you'll also feel more > confident in tackling those. Looking forward to it. Thanks very much for your help, and best wishes, -- Eric Frederickson ericfrederickson68@gmail.com https://emfred.com