Hello and Patch Review Request

[Caius]

Hello 0 A.D. developers!

My background is mostly in C#, but a few years ago I did write a basic game engine in DirectX and C++. I've followed this project on and off for a while. Now I find out that you've gone open source - very cool!

I've started looking through the source code, doing some basic testing at home (I was actually able to play a network game against myself! Sweet!).

To get started, I assigned myself ticket #402 from the 'simple' list. I've submitted a patch for this; could someone review it (attached to the ticket) and commit it to SVN for me?

Thanks!

(And yeah, you should probably set up a separate forum or online form for patch submissions. )

[feneur]

Hello, and thanks for your interest in 0 A.D. And of course for your patch, one of the programmers will take a look at it soon, and hopefully it will just be to commit it. Otherwise they'll get back to you in this forum.

(When we get more patch review requests we'll definitely set up something specifically for them, but until then this forum is probably the best alternative in my humble opinion. There's no reason to add more complexity if it doesn't add any value (like making it easier to find the patch review requests). We're in the process of redesigning the website though so I'll bring this up for discussion and we'll see what solution the team thinks is best. )

[Caius]

You're welcome!

I agree it should be really simple; I only mentioned a separate form/process/something would be helpful because submissions might be lost easily in a forum thread, especially if it contains multiple submissions in different posts.

Edited November 19, 2009 by Caius

[Ykkrosh]

Thanks, applied

By the way, do you have a real name and/or email address? It'd be nice to keep this list relatively up to date (although I'm not sure we've done a perfect job of that so far...), to keep track of who's patched the code in any way.

About the patch process: The current approach is that some people are following Trac's timeline RSS feed and will see any attachments and comments, and ideally one of the people ought to test and apply the patch straight away, so you shouldn't have to do anything. But that's not really very reliable, so it might be necessary to comment on Trac or on the forum somewhere if you've not heard anything after a few days. Maybe what we should do is add some kind of 'requesting review' flag on Trac, which people can set when adding patches, and then periodically we can check for any lost patches with that flag? That might be the simplest solution to stop things getting lost, unless anyone has better ideas.

[Caius]

That sounds like a good idea. I'm following the RSS feed already.

And yes, I do have a real name.

Lars Kemmann

To defy the spam bots... LarsKemmann.email = concat(firstName, lastName) + "@" + "aol" + "." + "com"

[Ykkrosh]

Thanks, I've finally got around to adding your name to the list now, though I've omitted your email address (since putting it in plain text would attract spam, and putting it in obfuscated form would be ugly). I've also added a review request checkbox to tickets, which should make them show up on this list - it's a fairly simplistic approach but it might be enough to help us keep track of things.

[feneur]

Looks good indeed. Will you please add this to http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/SubmittingPatches ?

[Ykkrosh]

I added it there. But then I changed my mind since the custom field messes things up a bit (it causes spurious change messages when updating old tickets, and it causes the wrong fields to show in certain query results), so I've removed the checkbox and changed that wiki page to say to use a "review" keyword. Hopefully that'll work better

[feneur]

Sounds good.