Getting Involved in Open Source Projects
- edited | 0 comments |Earlier this month, my first patch to an open source project was accepted. It was a thrill. In all these years of using open source libraries and software, I have never once given back to the community. I have made my own work open source under the MIT licence and have it hosted on the popular GitHub. I can't wait until my next pull request/submitted patch.
So how did it come around? Well I was reading the documentation on HBase at work, trying to work out whether I could get a description of a table. I found as I was scrolling through the docs that the font size was growing ever bigger.
Like a good citizen I fired up the Apache Jira and created my ticket feeling very proud of myself. It is not the first issue I have raised on an open source project. I am too eager to fire off an issue for someone else to solve. This time however, the project lead thanked me for my bug report but then asked if I had a patch. I thought to myself, who me? You trust me to dive into your project and change the code??
Well of course, that is what open source projects are all about - letting other people contribute, not just free stuff! So I thought, ye I can take a look at this closer and see what the problem is causing the font to get bigger.
I found that some javadocs in the class had some unclosed <code> tags. I looked around at other issues on the project to see how one even would submit a patch. I could see that some resolved ones had the code attached to the ticket itself. I thought this was a bit strange at first, why would you attach the code to the ticket? Surely the source control system would be suited to do this in some form of way.
Anyway, after some googling, I found how I could create the .patch file from the git command line:
git diff > mypatch.patch
I submitted the patch and the project lead thanked me and after some e-mails from a robot that does the automated tests, code qulity checks and build, the ticket was marked as resolved and now the online documentation is fixed!
It gave me a small sense of pride and am looking forward on creating my next patch. I may even try and find one that is more technically challenging.