[wp-hackers] 24-hour has-patch marathon TODAY

[Jeremy Clarke]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 1:06 PM, Stephanie Leary <steph at sillybean.net> wrote:
> The has-patch marathon is great. I'm really glad it's happening. I wish I
> had a better idea of how to contribute without letting my patches languish
> until the next marathon rolls around.

The best advice is to write your patches when you know you will be
able to spend some time promoting them, then right after they are
ready post your Trac ticket (with as much information as possible both
about your problem/use-cases and about your solution) and go into
#wordpress-dev IRC channel** and ask for a core dev to look at them.
Sometimes no one is around/available but if you ping every half hour
or so eventually someone will help you.

Ask if your patch/ticket makes sense, ask if they can test it, ask
what you need to do. This has been the best system for me and has
gotten me lots of important help that made my patches worth
committing. Remember that they seem perfect to you but they just
arent', there are things you didn't think of, and live chat with a
core dev is the fastest way to find those problems and at the same
time build up some trust with that core dev that your patch is
important/necessary/safe.

If you don't get it committed that day then buck up and try again
another day. You'll need to get your local install of WP up to the
latest SVN version and make sure your patch still works and doesn't
need editing, update the trac ticket if necessary, and start asking
about it some more.

It's not a quick or easy system but I'm kind of glad it isn't,
otherwise anyone's crappy, ill-considered patch with no oversight
could get in, then we'd have to change the name of the project to
TikiBlog :P

** on the irc.freenode.net server, you can sign in using
http://mibbit.com/chat/ as a web frontend for IRC if you don't have a
program like the wonderful Colloquy. Don't be afraid of IRC, it's like
IM but with way more people in it! http://codex.wordpress.org/IRC



-- 
Jeremy Clarke | http://simianuprising.com
Code and Design | http://globalvoicesonline.org