[gst-devel] ways to help out with 0.9

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Hi gang,

for people who've been holding back on helping out on 0.9 for lack of a
good entry point or a feeling of being lost, here are some simple ways
you can get started to help.

- finding leaks

With lots of stuff rewritten, leaks have undoubtedly crept in.  These
leaks can be important, especially in code that gets run a lot.  But
even leaks in less executed code paths are good to plug, since that
makes the others more visible.

You can use valgrind to check for memleaks on simple gst-launch
pipelines.  For example, I ran

valgrind --tool=memcheck
--leak-check=full /home/thomas/gst/head/gstreamer/tools/.libs/lt-gst-launch-0.9 fakesrc num-buffers=1 ! fakesink

and fixed some obvious leaks there recently.  You can test every
pipeline that works and search for leaks.  Just make sure you point it
to the actual libtool'd binary that you have.

- working on documentation

The API documentation has not caught up yet with the slew of new API.
When running "make" in the docs dir, a list of unused declarations is
being printed that needs to be a) checked and b) added to the correct
place in gstreamer-sections.txt

This is fairly easy work, it just needs doing.  If anyone wants to help
out there, let me know.

Also, we've started adding actual elements to the gtk-doc documentation,
so vmethods, signals, and properties get documented.  We also want to
add more descriptive documentation there.  Again, just work that needs
doing, a lot of the boilerplate is already there.

- writing unit tests

While looking over the new API pieces, it definately helps if you write
some unit tests to capture your new knowledge of the API in code.  Write
simple tests that try out correct functionality of the API, but also
error handling, boundary conditions, ...
Writing these tests also makes you think about the API and ask questions
you otherwise might not think of, so it's also a help for the others to
help them think about things they might have deferred.

If any of this tickles your fancy, let us know, and we'll get you sorted
and eased in gently.

Thomas


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