Skip to main content

DPS 909 - Release 0.4 - More Setup Troubles!

External Contribution

This week we begin release 0.4 in our Fall 2019 DPS 909 course. I am growing a bit more confident in contributing to shippable OSS now, so for my external contribution I continued by Python work from last week by submitting a PR to another Python-based web application. This time, the project was LibreOffice Crash Reporter, which aggregates crash reports from the well-known, open source office software suite, LibreOffice. I found this tool to be useful because I have used LibreOffice for quite some time on my laptop, which unfortunately did not come bundled with the full Microsoft Office package (student offers are only good for one key, and I used it on my desktop workstation already!). While LibreOffice is a reliable alternative, I can personally vouch that it is a bit more crash-prone than Microsoft Office, which made contributing to the LibreOffice Crash Reporter project all that more interesting for me.

The issue itself is simple: there is a dropdown list on the app that allows you to select which LibreOffice version you want to view crash reports for. In the current version, the options in the dropdown are unsorted, making it difficult to find a specific version. Someone requested that a change be made so that the dropdown list is sorted by version number, so I decided to tackle that feature. To do so, I had to battle through yet another gauntlet of dev environment setups, this time it was in Django and PostgreSQL. Once again, developing on a native Windows machine proved to be troublesome, as many shortcuts in setting up the dev env did not exist as they would on Unix-based systems. And also once again, Anaconda came to my rescue, providing me with the tools to create a virtual environment and to find and install the correct dependencies for this project. One particular thing I had trouble with was a mysterious executable called minidump-stackwalker. I still don't know exactly what it does, but from the research I've done, it seems it's responsible for producing compressed dump files of OS-relevant crash records. A unique binary executable of the minidump-stackwalker was required for the LibreOffice Crash Reporter project, as well as some very specific dependencies in the form of DLLs to get it to run on Windows. It was quite a detour to find these, but I did manage to stumble across this thread in the Electron repo that pointed me to everything I needed. Having done all of that, I still needed to install and set up PostgreSQL. Good thing I did have some experience in doing that from a previous project!

After getting past the hurdle of setting up the dev environment, I had to dig into the project to understand the codebase and know where to write my actual feature code. This was also quite a challenge, as I had no previous knowledge of Django, which is a full-stack framework for creating web apps in Python - much more complex than Flask, which I studied for my previous contribution! Even though the feature was as simple as producing a sorted dropdown list, just tracing the codebase to pinpoint the source of the dropdown's data tested my ability to read and follow code. It was obvious this project was still in its shallow stages, as there were no helpful contribution notes, nor was the code properly documented at all - a lot of research went into pushing such a small feature! After digging through template after template and data model after data model, I finally found the most logical place to write my data-sorting script. I then rebased my code and submitted a formal PR, which you can find here.

Before - unsorted dropdown.

After - sorted dropdown.

 Internal Contribution

I'm not quite read to describe my internal contribution to our Telescope project just yet - that will be covered next week!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DPS 909 - Release 0.2 - Hacktoberfest Week 3

I'll admit it right off: this week, I did not have a lot of time to spare for Hacktoberfest, so I was unable to tackle a new goal (out of the ones I set for myself at the start of the month). Nevertheless, I did not want to jank up the weekly momentum I had by missing a contribution, so I simply opted for a simple one instead. I found a nice project , by GitHub user vichitr , that focused on encouraging amateur contributors during Hacktoberfest, not unlike the last repo I contributed to. Instead of focusing on design patterns, vichitr's project contains a variety of issues that programmers are invited to tackle. I decided to contribute to issue #6 on the repo, which is to implement a data structure in the language of your choice. Since I was short on time for the week, I decided to contribute a threaded tree by overhauling a previous project I did as a school assignment. A threaded tree is a binary search tree that supports easy, in-order traversal of its values. Normally,...
Post a Comment
Read more

DPS 909 - Lab 3 - Hacktoberfest, and the Very Scary Repository

It's that time of year; the mornings are getting chilly, the leaves are turning, the pumpkin spice is flowing, and open source developers are getting all worked up over something called Hacktoberfest . Not to be confused with the other , similar-sounding (though arguably no less beer-filled) celebration, Hacktoberfest is a chance for open source enthusiast to truly flex their projects and contributions. Hosted by DigitalOcean , Hacktoberfest 2019 is an event running throughout the month of October that encourages activity in the open source community. It is completely free to sign up, and participants can even link their Github accounts to use as their Hacktoberfest profiles. As you may have already guessed, I will be participating in this event as my next major milestone on my journey into the world of open source. Through the miracle of APIs, even my profile picture was imported! While the prospect of diving headfirst into such a large, open source event as a beginner may s...
Post a Comment
Read more

DPS 909 - Release 0.2 - Hacktoberfest Week 1

As mentioned in my last blog post , I am currently in the midst of participating in Hacktoberfest in order to deepen my understanding of open source. For my first week, I decided to start with a simple issue that I could confidently contribute to: the HackSta account's issue #12 . This issue invites other Github users to contribute customized icons for the Atom text editor (a product of Github!). It was very easy to start - users simply have to fork the repo and contribute new designs for the Atom logo in SVG format. The project has had many contributions in the past, and already has a large collection of over 500 icons, so there was lots of materials and references to work off of. The entire collection of custom Atom icons can be found on the project's website . There are entire collections of interesting variations on the default Atom logo, including palettes pulled directly from the color values of country flags and famous sports team logos. Take your pi...
Post a Comment
Read more