[Mesa-dev] How do I start contributing to Mesa?

[Brian Paul]

On 06/04/2013 01:08 PM, Benjamin Bellec wrote:
> Le 04/06/2013 21:54, Brian Paul a écrit :
>> On 06/04/2013 06:37 AM, Arnas Milaševičius wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> First of all, I'm not sure if it's the right place to ask such a
>>> question, but I'll try. I've started learning OpenGL and I really want
>>> to contribute to Mesa project, but the way to do it had always been a
>>> mistery for me. As a beginner contributor, I still don't understand
>>> which bugs should I take, how do I fix em? It's like, you take the bug,
>>> but... where the heck do you start fixing it? How do you find the core
>>> of the problem? I see many people telling that the best start is to
>>> start fixing bugs you have, but atm I don't have any problems that'd
>>> bother me.
>>
>> Probably the easiest bugs to fix are those that fail on assertions or
>> crash.  With those you can at least get a stack trace in the debugger
>> and get some idea of the code path involved.  With general rendering
>> bugs it's often harder to know where to start looking.
>>
>> Otherwise, which driver are you using or are you interested in?  It's
>> sometimes easier to focus on one particular area of mesa (such as a
>> driver, or say the GLSL compiler) than to try to understand everything.
>>
>>
>>> So, could anyone point me to the right direction? Maybe share your
>>> experience, how did you start, what do you do when you start fixing bugs
>>> and how should I fix em as a beginner, etc?
>>
>> Again, if there's a particular of area of interest to you, start
>> there.  Read the source code.  If you find the comments lacking, post
>> patches to improve the comments as you figure things out.
>>
>> There's a terribly out-dated helpwanted.html file in the docs
>> directory which was intended to list things to be worked on.  It would
>> probably be better if were more active in creating Bugzilla entries
>> for to-do items that we'd like to do but don't always have time for.
>> I'm sure we could come up with some easier things for newbies.  I
>> could probably come up with 1 or 2 things pretty quickly...
> Hello,
>
> I also think that it would be very interesting for beginners (like me)
> that experimented mesa developpers writes some easy (even trivial!) TODO
> things on the wiki (for instance
> http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/R600ToDo/) or elsewhere. Tasks that you
> (as experimented) consider very easy, "useless" or with very low
> priority... for beginners these kind of tasks could already be a hard
> work to begin with.

I've created two simple tasks in bugzilla:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65373
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65374

If you want to take one of these, maybe say so in the bug report first 
so that we don't get duplicated efforts.

I encourage other Mesa developers to add more simple to-do items in 
bugzilla.

-Brian