On Aug 4, 2014, at 3:51 PM, stepharo <steph...@free.fr> wrote: > Hi guys > > I'm sure that most of you did not realize it, but Pharo does not magically > improve. It improves because some of us are looking > at the tracker issues and looking at the code and improving it. > > Since Pharo is yours I wonder why you do not take the time to improve. In > fact, this is the key advantage of true open-source: being able to have > an impact. An example, I was fed up to have a stupid widget to move method > between protocol and classes between packages. I fixed it. > It took my 20 min without knowing anything about Nautilus. > > And it improved Pharo Right now, Right there. > Of course if more people would be improving Pharo we could also focus on > enabling technology and frameworks. But > apparently we have to choose either we improve Pharo now or we invent cool > stuff that takes time. > I wonder why I do not go for the fame of writing a cool stuff instead of just > improving systematically the system. > > I wrote some roadmaps for people willing also to help. > > https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-workingRoadmaps >
Okay, so that’s good, but you guys really need to improve the documentation on the mechanical walkthrough of how to actually claim and submit a bug fix. Today, I happened to have some spare time, so I figured, what the hell, why not see if I can’t fix some bugs blocking the Pharo 4 release. It’s a reach, granted, but I used to be good at Smalltalk, I’m still a good programmer, and I figure at least one of the blockers is in the really-annoying-but-technically-easy bucket that no one was willing to touch yet, so chances are good. Armed with my old knowledge of how Squeak contrib used to work, I at least got as far as manually downloading a VM, manually downloading a .changes/.image, and manually downloading a .sources. Then I go to pharo.org and… Well, hmm. No instructions on the submission or development process? Well, no matter, I know you guys use FogBugz, so maybe on the FogBugz wiki? The landing page is unhelpful; clicking on the word “here” at “Reporting or Fixing a Bug?” takes me to http://pharo.org/get-involved which is a 404. Heading back, I try “Documentation”, which contains a lot of documentation, but none how to submit fixes. Likewise, I can get great info on the workflow of a bug, but not on how to move code through that workflow. At this point, by luck, I realize that there’s a link to “Contribute” in the TOC in FogBugz. Brilliant, exactly what I want! And it has a video walkthrough, no less, which takes me to http://vimeo.com/75183993 and…nope, that’s a 404 again. Thankfully, the link below it appears to let me download a nice MP4, which does walk me through…submitting a slice. I actually have no idea if this is the right way to do things anymore, but given that you guys seem to have a super-active GitHub repo, I kind of doubt it. And while there’s some documentation scattered around about how to use Git and Pharo, it’s not centralized or obvious. It’s up to the community to be involved with the tools they love and to submit patches, and you’re totally right to remind everyone that it’s up to us to improve Pharo if we want to keep it alive, but it’s up to the core team to make sure that it’s easy for us to do so, and I think that Pharo’s not doing terribly well on that front right now. —Benjamin
