Hello Lance, We would be glad to get some help and your introductory mail sounds promising ;-)
The Trac project and its 900+ opened tickets has definitely some room for new contributors (and renewed contributions from old contributors are still very much appreciated ;-) ). Lance Hendrix wrote: > I would like to introduce myself to the Trac Dev team and ask about the > status of several items I am interested in from the > http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracDev/Proposals page. I have read most > of the documentation on the http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracDev and > also looked over the ToDo and ticket lists. I have also done a > preliminary review of the code in order to familiarize myself with what > you guys have done. I am an enthusiastic champion of Trac and believe > that Trac coupled with Eclipse Mylyn is one of the best project > management tools available today (and one of the only competitors to > Microsoft's Team Systems product). > > If you are interested, my background is posted on my website at > http://www.lancehendrix.com/about/index.html. > > I would assume it would be best for me to start with assisting with > (issue) tickets or testing, but even after reviewing the existing > tickets I am unsure where to start as I don't want to work on something > that is already being addressed or that is not a current priority, so a > few pointers would be welcomed. > Yes, that's exactly the right way. Let me try to give you an overview of the current activity. We have currently two major branches, each with a release nearing completion: - /branches/0.11-stable, where we prepare 0.11.5, planned for end of June - /trunk, which corresponds to 0.12, the next major release, planned for "as soon as possible" ;-) There's also a number of "experimental" branches, in the /sandbox. Starting to work on the 0.11.x bug reports is where the contributions will be the most immediately useful. I think 0.11.5 is mostly ready to go, though among the opened tickets, there are still a few outstanding ones that would be better fixed in 0.11.5 rather than later (e.g. #7490, #4245). In general, pick any ticket in 0.11.5 or 0.11.6 that match your center of interest, and go for it: verify that an issue is reproducible, test an already proposed fix, review existing patches, and of course, propose your own fixes. By commenting on the tickets, you'll usually get feedback from the other developers pretty quickly. For 0.12, the main focus is still i18n. Also, Remy Blank and me have been quite active on the MultipleRepositorySupport branch, which is nearing completion and is very likely to be ready for 0.12. There were several other improvements made to the custom queries and SQL reports, the timeline and the wiki, but not that many compared to 0.11, so if there's still any particular improvement you'd like to see in 0.12, feel free to work on it. Among the other recent activity, there was some effort done on the testing infrastructure, where we recently added the possibility to run the unit and functional tests with alternate DB backends (i.e. not just the in-memory SQLite database). Btw, although a bit involved, getting familiar with our testing infrastructure is a good way to start, as running the test suite will help you gain confidence in your changes when you tweak the code. By going into trunk/doc/, you should be able to build the developer guide which contains some details for getting the test environment up and running. Note that when I contributed to this documentation, I was pleased about how convenient it was to use Sphinx for this job, and so I wished to extend the developer guide even further. I think it would be interesting to have both someone familiar with the code base /and/ someone discovering it, when writing such a guide, as this give you the possibility to focus on what's really important to document. So if you're interested, that's also one area where you could help by asking questions and pointing to the parts of the API which need to be documented the most. > I also reviewed the > http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracObjectModelProposal and have an > interest in this as I recently completed a project where I implemented a > similar idea (common attributes like id, shortname, displayname) so that > the system could operate "generically" on most any type of "entity" > within the system. Albeit, this was implemented in PHP rather than > Python. However, I assume, as stated above that I would need to "get my > feet wet" or "prove myself" by making contributions to smaller items > before being taken seriously for tackling something of this size. > Now that's really great! I'm pleased to see that you find this interesting. You should also have a look at the GenericTrac page, which is a bit more recent, and also at the related FieldRefactoring page. Looking at the time when I wrote the first versions of the TracObjectModelProposal page (back in Nov. 2004), it would seem that the idea has stagnated, but the reality is more that this used to be a "contentious" issue, some developers being hostile to the idea. I still believe that there's a lot of value there, both in terms of added flexibility and reduced complexity. My own priorities for future Trac development are more in the direction of multi-project support (TracDev/Proposals/MultipleProject), but if there's enough momentum, the GenericTrac effort could be revived as well. > In short, I wanted to volunteer my time and enthusiasm, even if it is > only to contribute documentation. I am at your disposal and looking > forward to adding my contributions to this effort based on your > recommendations and suggestions. Thanks a lot for your interest, we're looking forward to your contributions! Don't hesitate to ask for more precise informations once you get to the details. -- Christian --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac Development" group. 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