Getting the feet wet as a contributor?

[Chud]

Hi all,

I've been toying with the idea of getting into the development process lightly, so I'm looking for some suggestions and a little feedback. My day job is not coding (wrangling Cisco routers and switches, mostly), but I have some mostly-quick-and-dirty coding experience in Perl, Java, and C.

So, I expect that a prerequisite is figuring out where all the repository stuff is and making sure that I can check things out and back in again correctly; assuming that, are there some basic tickets that I could start with that are pretty simple and could serve to 1) get some annoying, boring, or trivial stuff out of the way so the more experienced folks don't have it on their list, 2) serve as an aid to me familiarizing myself with the existing code base, and 3) serve as an aid to me shaking off the rust on my very rust-encrusted C skills?

Given that, any hints, tips, suggestions, pointers, or direction that anyone might suggest?

Cheers,
-Chris

[camlost]

If you want to help with non-coding:
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=4494

For help with downloading the source (git):
http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=4330

For a list of bugs:
http://trac.rephial.org/
http://trac.rephial.org/query?status...3.3.0&order=id

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Chud

Hi all,

I've been toying with the idea of getting into the development process lightly, so I'm looking for some suggestions and a little feedback. My day job is not coding (wrangling Cisco routers and switches, mostly), but I have some mostly-quick-and-dirty coding experience in Perl, Java, and C.

So, I expect that a prerequisite is figuring out where all the repository stuff is and making sure that I can check things out and back in again correctly; assuming that, are there some basic tickets that I could start with that are pretty simple and could serve to 1) get some annoying, boring, or trivial stuff out of the way so the more experienced folks don't have it on their list, 2) serve as an aid to me familiarizing myself with the existing code base, and 3) serve as an aid to me shaking off the rust on my very rust-encrusted C skills?

Given that, any hints, tips, suggestions, pointers, or direction that anyone might suggest?

Cheers,
-Chris

In addition to the links Camlost gave, this might help.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Angband coding. My first question is what is your platform? If you by any chance develop and play on Windows, there are soooo many things we need help with. In fact if you play on anything other than Linux, that are several bugs which can't be reproduced on Linux, so help tracking those down would be good.

Second point is don't worry about being rusty - many contributors / maintainers / variant authors didn't know any C at all before starting (me included). It's generally a well-documented codebase (though there are some exceptions, unfortunately).

Thirdly - related - there is almost always someone on #angband-dev at irc.freenode.net if you have a question about it. Please do drop by.

We are now trying to move to a "feature freeze" for 3.3, which we would like to release in July. So the most important contributions at the moment would be fixes for bugs which are tagged as "3.3.0" in the tracker (Camlost gave the link). If you would like to work on any of those, please do - get yourself an account at trac.rephial.org and assign a ticket to yourself so we know you're trying to work on it. (If you find you can't fix it, we're no worse off than we were before so no harm done.)

We will also be publishing a roadmap for features for 3.4, so if you decide you'd like to work on some specific change(s) we can incorporate that ... but I am getting ahead of myself.

Thanks for your interest, and if you need any help with git or the buildsystem or anything, just ask.

[Chud]

Originally Posted by Magnate

In addition to the links Camlost gave,
Welcome to the wonderful world of Angband coding. My first question is what is your platform? If you by any chance develop and play on Windows, there are soooo many things we need help with.

I play on Windows, primarily, but I have only ever done C coding on Linux. I'm not averse to jumping into Windows though--I've used Eclipse to do Java under Windows. I'll read through the links you've pointed me to - there's a recommended compiler to use there?

Thirdly - related - there is almost always someone on #angband-dev at irc.freenode.net if you have a question about it. Please do drop by.

Wow, been years since I've looked at IRC. :-) Thanks.

-C

[camlost]

Originally Posted by Chud

I play on Windows, primarily, but I have only ever done C coding on Linux. I'm not averse to jumping into Windows though--I've used Eclipse to do Java under Windows. I'll read through the links you've pointed me to - there's a recommended compiler to use there?
-C

I use CodeBlocks for Windows to compile Sangband, which works well with GCC. Other people use the MS compiler/IDE. Other people use cygwin/mingW, which is another way of getting a gcc compiler.

IMO, getting a project setup and compiling is a somewhat slow/annoying step. Does the Vanilla git repository hold any pre-made project files? If so, you might want to use one of them.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Chud

I play on Windows, primarily, but I have only ever done C coding on Linux. I'm not averse to jumping into Windows though--I've used Eclipse to do Java under Windows. I'll read through the links you've pointed me to - there's a recommended compiler to use there?

Well, the only Windows development in the team currently happens via MinGW ... so, perversely, it would be awesome if you decided to use MSVC. Because there are people who complain that MSVC doesn't build properly, and none of us can test/fix it. And it would make the Windows port more robust if it was built and tested by different means.

To pick up camlost's point, I have an eclipse .cproject file, and I think someone (konijn, maybe?) may have an MSVC project file ... but we have no official store of them. Yet.

[Antoine]

Originally Posted by Magnate

Well, the only Windows development in the team currently happens via MinGW ... so, perversely, it would be awesome if you decided to use MSVC. Because there are people who complain that MSVC doesn't build properly, and none of us can test/fix it. And it would make the Windows port more robust if it was built and tested by different means.

To pick up camlost's point, I have an eclipse .cproject file, and I think someone (konijn, maybe?) may have an MSVC project file ... but we have no official store of them. Yet.

I have an MSVC project file for NPP if you want it.

A.

[Chud]

Originally Posted by Antoine

I have an MSVC project file for NPP if you want it.

A.

Sure, I'll take you up on that - thanks! Post a link to it or feel free to email it to me, chd-at-chud.net.

I messed around with visual studio 2010 for awhile today, but was unable to get the project set up correctly as far as I can tell - you can create a project from an existing set of code, but it doesn't seem to present the directory tree in its correct hierarchy, among other problems. Most likely I just don't know how to use it yet.

Codeblocks with MinGW looks easier, though I also didn't get the project to present correctly there either. I'll play with MSVC if that'll be more useful.

I did get the source forked and cloned locally from github without much trouble though.

[camlost]

Originally Posted by Magnate

but we have no official store of them. Yet.

I've figured that there's no reason *not* to add these to the repository, though I haven't done so yet for mine. They're more or less like make files, which are already included. It's not like it would add a lot of overhead to checkout -- my codeblocks project file is only 7kb of XML. Of course, there's no guarantee that they work for someone else, but it seems like a decent start.

[Antoine]

Originally Posted by Chud

Sure, I'll take you up on that - thanks! Post a link to it or feel free to email it to me, chd-at-chud.net.

Actually, probably the easiest is if you download Quick from http://angband.oook.cz/quickband/Quickband_2_0_2b.zip

(the VS project file is basically the same as the one for NPP)

A.