Student Tip: Patching makes perfect

Posted by alex ua on March 30, 2009 at 3:38am

This is a public service announcement to all of the students who are interested in working on a Drupal project for this year's Summer of Code. If you are new to the community and are curious what the best way is to attract a great mentor to work with, the answer is pretty straight forward: submit a patch on Drupal.org. Creating patches for Drupal, or any of the many modules or themes that call drupal.org home, is the fastest way to gain "community karma", which could be precisely what leads to you getting the most awesome mentor possible. And, you'll need to know how to work with Drupal's issue tracking system (there are also instructions for using the issue queue) and patching in general, so you might as well get a head start now!

The best place to get started with patching is the Novice Issue Queue. There are enough bite size issues there that you should be able to easily find one that you can create a patch for in a few short hours. If you do post a patch, please let us know in the comments below.

Comments

There's a novice queue?!

Posted by JamesAn on March 30, 2009 at 7:06am

There's a novice queue?! I did not know that.

I've been hesitant about patching, second-guessing myself, I guess. I did end up pushing one out back in late-Jan for an issue I raised about the Addresses module, but the maintainer didn't even acknowledge the issue.

A little discouraging.

I'll try some to do more again. Most of the issues in the novice queue are for D7. I hope the API hasn't changed too much; I guess I'll find out when I start chugging along. ^_^

And

Posted by dmitrig01 on March 31, 2009 at 1:43am

It's not just about getting a good mentor! People recognized the community are more likely to get accepted. If you write patches, we will recognize you as a contributor.

Patching fun!

Posted by JamesAn on March 31, 2009 at 6:16am

So I jumped back in to make some more patches.

These patches are confirmed by the PIFR, although someone else still needs to confirm their intended functionality.
http://drupal.org/node/19646
http://drupal.org/node/60468

These patches failed, but it's a bug with the Project Issue File Review (PIFR) in issue #408982. It tries to execute files that patches delete and throws a PHP syntax error in the process.
http://drupal.org/node/417560
http://drupal.org/node/418760

The PIFR hasn't tested this one yet, although it passes my local D7 tests.
http://drupal.org/node/313801

Documentation patch for D5, D6, and D7.
http://drupal.org/node/411388

I didn't think I was ever

Posted by bradfordcp@drup... on April 1, 2009 at 12:13am

I didn't think I was ever going to get the whole patching thing right. BUT I think I got it down (along with how to run the built in tests)

Here's to my first patch!
http://drupal.org/node/193897

~Chris

Pretty cool, huh?

Posted by JamesAn on April 1, 2009 at 2:50am

I find it really neat how the patches are automatically run against tests made for SimpleTest. I didn't know about SimpleTest until I poked around the novice patches, so I'm really glad I'm doing them; you learn a whole lot.

Maybe I'm just new to novice patching or maybe it's just because novice patches are relatively quick and easy, but it's actually fun. (Ask me that in a year... maybe the answer will change, but I hope not!)