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

[Brian Paul]

On 06/05/2013 04:09 AM, Arnas Milaševičius wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 12:44 AM, Arnas Milaševičius <giant1gf at gmail.com
> <mailto:giant1gf at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     I've fixed the first "bug" but I wonder what would be the right way
>     to submit this patch, because I needed to change like 100 or more files?
>
>
>     On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 11:16 PM, Brian Paul <brianp at vmware.com
>     <mailto:brianp at vmware.com>> wrote:
>
>         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/
>             <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=65373>
>         https://bugs.freedesktop.org/__show_bug.cgi?id=65374
>         <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
>

 > Okay, I've sent the patch to the mailing list, I hope it will be
 > accepted. By the way, could someone add some a little bit harder bugs or
 > something to bugzilla for beginners? Not just renaming functions.
 >
 >

Here's another simple task:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65420

-Brian