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

[marius.storm-olsen at nokia.com]

On 12/21/2011 10:43 AM, ext Dave Mateer wrote:
> I didn't intend my post to take a defensive tone. Again, I *really*
> appreciate the framework and all the people working on it; Qt is
> top-notch! It just seemed like there was some discussion on these
> things and thought it might be helpful to have an outsider position.
> Maybe I just misinterpreted the current atmosphere!

I certainly didn't read it in a defensive tone, so no worries. My reply 
was perhaps a bit crass, but I did not mean any thing by it.

I certainly see the ease of contributing by simply attaching patches to 
a Jira task, but I think we need to be wary so it doesn't become the 
defacto way for someone to send patches to the community. If we get many 
of those, we may end up with someone's day just consisting of finding 
these patches, applying locally, compile test it, evaluate it for 
patents and copyright infringments (since they are the ones submitting 
it and putting their butts on the line), and the committing it upstream 
for comments.

Also, it would benefit you more by doing it yourself, since only that 
way can you build up your own reputation in the community, and learn 
about the various coding styles etc, making it easier for you to get 
your contributions into the MCL. (You might not care about that, but I 
do hope you will come back and contribute more, and when you do your 
reputation and previous experience will help you.)


> I think my challenges were that it was not entirely clear to me
> *where* the problems I was having were. In other words, it was not
> clear to me that the build documentation was incorrect until after I
> had already spent several hours trying to build with those
> instructions. And now I am seeing through the discussion list that
> maybe Mac OS X building is just broken at the moment. So a lot of my
> delays may just be choosing an unfortunate time to start trying to
> give back to the community! :-) I'm sure once everything is ironed
> out the process will be much simpler, just as your post suggests.

Right, the stability of the desktop platforms at the moment is varied. 
Linux should be performing pretty well, while OS X and Windows not 
having caught up yet. Not the greatest time to jump into the project, I 
admit :)

We are migrating Qt 4 over to Gerrit as well, which of course will be 
much more stable, and probably a better place to start with your 
patches, since they are 4.7 based anyways.


> No, I'm not using Qt5 in production. I'm just trying to follow the
> instructions of fixing in Qt5 first, then cherry-picking back into
> Qt4.x. We're using 4.7.4 as our base.

Thank you for trying that! However, we *can* go both ways, and 
cherry-pick 4.x patches into Qt 5 as well. So in this case, that might 
be the better alternative. Then you can keep working on a code base you 
are familiar with, and already have compiled locally, and someone else 
mostly working on the Qt 5 code line could help cherry-pick it into Qt 
5, if it passed the peer review in Gerrit.

If you are on IRC on Freenode, on the #qt-labs channel, it should be 
fairly easy to find a Qt 5 "cherry-pick buddy" :)

Thank you for your valuable input, and thank you for spending time 
trying to figure out how to contribute back!

-- 
.marius