Getting started contributing.

Hi, I would like to start contributing to git and am looking for a small project idea to get started with. On the Small Project Ideas wiki <https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SmallProjectsIdeas> site there is a suggestion for adding a 'git rebase --status' command that sounds like it would be good for someone who has little knowledge of the code base. Is this project still wanted? Aside from that, 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? Apologies if this isn't the correct place to be posting. Thanks Adam Fraser

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adamfraser <adamfraser0@gmail.com> writes:

I think the two patches Duy just posted tonight overlap with that topic, and I suspect it would give the end users a better experience to put the information in "git status" output rather than a separate "git rebase" subcommand. Perhaps you can work with him to see what other things his patch may have missed can be improved?

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

(I'm the one who wrote the idea on the wiki)

"git status" already shows a lot of valuable information about rebase, but my idea was that there's still room for a much more verbose command (hence too verbose to appear in the output of "git branch" or "git status"), saying eg.

* Which patch is being applied (we can imagine giving just the subject
  line by default, but showing the complete patch with an additional
  --patch option). I often miss that when trying to understand the
  origin of a conflict. I can manually look at file
  .git/rebase-merge/patch (I seem to remember a patch that shows the
  path to this file when rebase stops, but I can't find it anymore), but
  a nice porcelain would be nice.

* What's still on the todo-list

Also, perhaps this could gather the advices "(run git rebase <something> to <do something>)" currently in the output of "git status", and "git status may just say "(run git rebase --status for more information)" instead of 2 or 3 lines of advices.

adamfraser <adamfraser0@gmail.com> writes:

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.

Thanks.

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 2:49 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

A few other things

 - Mark more strings for translation (not as easy as it sounds, some
strings can't be translated)
 - Color more in the output where it makes sense
 - Stop/Warn the user from updating HEAD (e.g. checkout another
branch) while in the middle of a rebase (some makes sense, most is by
mistake)

PS. You are welcome to improve my two patches Junio mentioned. I don't think it overlaps much with "git rebase --status" though. Printing the remaining steps, or what patch being applied is not going to be done by "git status".

Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:

True, but not a good advice for somebody new, exactly for the reason you stated, i.e. some strings must not be translated.

Eeek.

Perhaps, but again probably not for somebody new who hasn't mastered various workflows and understood why it may make sense to allow it.

Thanks for all of the replies. I'll have a look into the suggestions and try to find somewhere I can help out. :)

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

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

adamfraser <adamfraser0@gmail.com> writes:

Just to make it clear: this page is not "the official TODO-list for Git", but a list where we (essentially me) can throw ideas of things to be implemented.

As you did, the first thing to do is to discuss ideas on the list, to make sure they are actually wanted.