[Adium-devl] Beginner looking to make a contribution

[Peter Hosey]

On Oct 29, 2007, at 20:51:45, Ankur Oberoi wrote:
> How often should i be doing an update through subversion?

For general usage of trunk, you can update however often you want.  
You may find it a good idea to subscribe to our Adium-svn list[1],  
and read the commit messages, and update whenever there's a new  
feature or a bug fix that you want.

Speaking of the Adium-svn list, it's also cool for you to read the  
code differences and submit a patch if you spot a newly-introduced  
(or long-standing) bug. It's not a requirement, though.

There are three circumstances in which you should always update first:

1. You've found a bug.

Find reliable steps to reproduce, then update and try them again.  
This saves you filing a ticket and us closing it for a bug that we  
already fixed.

2. You're about to start writing a patch.

Keep an always-clean checkout around. Before you start writing a  
patch, update that checkout. Then copy it (cp -R clean-checkout my- 
patch-wc), and begin working in the copy (the *working copy* as the  
phrase was originally intended).

3. You're finished writing the patch.

When you believe you're done, cd into your working copy and update  
again. If anything has changed, build and test again. Wash, rinse,  
and repeat, until (1) your code builds and runs and works and (2)  
there are no further changes to retrieve.

> What's a good rule of thumb? … Should I wait until later on, when  
> I am done with my fix, to update so that all my changes can be  
> integrated all at once, or will this likely be difficult?

If you don't start your work on a fully-up-to-date copy of Adium,  
you're very likely to have conflicts in your patch when we go to  
apply it. If you're lucky, we'll still be able to use the patch;  
otherwise, we may reject it outright and ask you to regenerate the  
diff against the current revision of Adium.

[1]: http://adiumx.com/mailman/listinfo/adium-svn_adiumx.com

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