[GSoC] I'm interested in participating and need some guides

[Clemens Lang]

Hi,


----- On 11 Mar, 2015, at 19:34, Chunyang Xu xuchunyang56 at gmail.com wrote:

> I have some knowledge in C and Emacs Lisp, I teach myself how to
> programming. I have my personal open source projects hosting on Github
> (see https://github.com/xuchunyang if you are interested). I've been a
> Mac OS X user about one year, before that, I'd used GNU/Linux for more
> than two years, I also worked for GNOME as a GSoC student last year.

That sounds like you would need to brush up on your Tcl knowledge, because
most of MacPorts (and certainly the parts you're interested in) are written
in Tcl. See
  https://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCode#Whatyoushoulddobeforehandinginanapplication
for a few first steps and make sure to go through the Tcl tutorial at
  http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/tutorial/tcltutorial.html

> My English is also limited because I don't have any chance to use it
> execpt while I'm programming, but reading and writing basic English is
> fine.

Looks fine for written communication to me.


> I've already get start on preparing several days ago. For now, I've
> installed MacPorts from svn sources and read some svn and Tcl
> tutorials. But I am not sure if I am too late to prepare, am I?

No, you're not too late. Sorry about the delay in replying by the way,
most of us have day jobs as well.


> Currently, I am interested in two potential ideas:
> 1. Improve fetching from version control
> 2. Improve startupitem code

I think there's a ticket for the first one somewhere in our bugtracker
with a couple of ideas. I don't have the link handy, but maybe somebody
else on the list has?

For the startupitem code, you would probably begin by throwing out the
support for pre-launchd boot systems we still have and do a little
cleanup before implementing new features. You should read up on launchd
plists and their features and think about which features might be useful
to have easily accessible in MacPorts.


> It's clear for me what purpose they want to achieve just according to
> their title and description, even I haven't yet have a detailed
> understanding of these two ideas.
> 
> I plan to learn more about them during my free time. I want to let you
> guys know my situation and I will be very gald if anyone can give soem
> suggestion for me to get familir with MacPorts's codebase quickly, for
> example, where to find some bugs which are easy to fix for beginner.

For the startupitem code, look at base/src/port1.0/portstartupitem.tcl.
You can find more tickets to fix in our bug tracker at
  http://trac.macports.org/query?status=assigned&status=new&status=reopened&component=base&col=id&col=summary&col=status&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&col=component&desc=1&order=id
Not all of those are easy to fix, but there are certainly a few that
should be pretty simple, e.g. #46956 or #46733.

Let me know if you have further questions.


-- 
Clemens Lang