[Development] Patches in JIRA (Was: (no subject))

[marius.storm-olsen at nokia.com]

On 21/12/2011 07:23, ext Dave Mateer wrote:
> I don't know that my opinion matters much, as I'm just new on the
> list. But I will confirm that the challenges below (and that others
> have mentioned recently on this group) are very much the situation I
> find myself in. I have about five patches I would like to submit for
> bugs in JIRA, mostly priority 3 stuff. But I have already lost two
> full days fighting Git and Gerrit and building Qt5. Some of the
> instructions online are confusing or outdated. I understand that this
> is still transitional and early, and many of those growing pains will
> be resolved. And I have been nothing but impressed with the dedication
> and commitment to excellence that the Qt team exhibits.
> Nonetheless, if I could just submit my patches to something like JIRA
> or hand them off to a "sponsor" of sorts that already has his
> Git/Gerrit area configured and knows the idiosyncrasies of building
> Qt5, that would make me much more inclined to contribute. As it is,
> I'd like to just give up, but I feel like my acceptance of the LGPL
> terms constrains me to at least keep trying a few more days. (We are
> already using these patches in our production code.)
> Again, not sure it matters much, but there is at least one case study
> from someone on the "outside." :-)

First of all, I hope you are not using Qt 5 in production code yet! ;)

Second, if the wikis are unclear, you can help fix them (they are wikis 
after all), or even send the issues to this mailing list and someone 
else will likely fix them. Yes, the wikis are relatively new, so there 
are bound to be kinks which needs ironing out.

On to how to push your patches. It's really not *that* hard. If we 
ignore the time it takes to clone Qt 5, it should be fairly quick to set 
up and push the initial patches.

Only once:
   1) Create a Jira/Gerrit users
   2) Ensure the following in your <HOME>/.ssh/config:
      Host codereview.qt-project.org
          Port 29418
          User <gerrit user>
   3) git clone git://gitorious.org/qt/qt5.git
   4) cd qt5 && perl init-repository --codereview-username <gerrit user>

For each contribution:
   5) cd <module>
   6) <...do patch stuff...>
   7) git push gerrit HEAD:refs/for/master

And then you are done. Not too bad?
And you only do steps 1-4 once, when you start contributing. After that, 
you only have to do 3 steps to put it straight into reach of the master 
code line. Getting it accepted and integrated only takes a few clicks 
for someone with the proper rights. Easy!

If you continue to contribute patches as attachments to Jira tasks, 
someone else would have to spend valuable time to continue to download 
the patches, apply them into a clean branch, and push them; moving much 
of the load over to someone else, which is obviously sub-optimal for the 
community as a whole.

(Yes, I took out the compilation step; you'd want to do that too, but if 
we are talking production code, I assume you've already compiled it 
before. If you need to do new revisions, of course you'd have to compile 
it first before you push again ;) )

-- 
.marius