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 <http://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.
You know the guy doing the video remove it because it was in rage
against us.
We were not aware that it was linked them.
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.
We add a description on the old web site but he got lost.
Now in a nutshell, to submit a fix
- donwload latest image (there is a script on download)
- do a fix for a giving bug
- publish a slice press (+ slice) in MC, add the dirty packages
- publish it in the inbox (click on inbox and press save)
- take a fresh image.
- reload it and check that it fixes the problem (open MC and click
on inbox + open).
Does it help?
Was it so complex?
—Benjamin
