From: Eric Frederickson <ericfrederickson68@gmail•com>
To: "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste•net>
Cc: git@vger•kernel.org, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox•com>
Subject: Re: A Question from a Hopeful Future Contributor
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2025 21:22:49 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87zfczodue.fsf@arch.mail-host-address-is-not-set> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <aHwZQFtMS2fk5FID@fruit.crustytoothpaste.net>
"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste•net> 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
prev parent reply other threads:[~2025-07-20 1:22 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2025-07-18 22:26 A Question from a Hopeful Future Contributor Eric Frederickson
2025-07-18 23:15 ` Junio C Hamano
2025-07-19 19:57 ` Eric Frederickson
2025-07-26 14:21 ` D. Ben Knoble
2025-07-28 15:02 ` Junio C Hamano
2025-07-28 16:54 ` D. Ben Knoble
2025-07-18 23:31 ` Ayush Chandekar
2025-07-19 22:06 ` Lucas Seiki Oshiro
2025-07-20 1:02 ` Eric Frederickson
2025-07-19 22:16 ` brian m. carlson
2025-07-20 1:22 ` Eric Frederickson [this message]
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