[Mesa-dev] Newbie task to get started

[Emil Velikov]

On 11 April 2016 at 12:15, Ernst Sjöstrand <ernstp at gmail.com> wrote:
> One idea I had was helping fixing Coverity errors, but they seem to be
> locked in behind closed doors.
Almost... all you need is to setup an account with coverity (you can
use your github) and request access to mesa via their UI.

> There are other static checkers of
> course, and one could look into various good compiler warnings (with
> newer/alternative compilers)?
>
clang has a nice one. CPPCheck tends to work, but gets confused by
complex projects such as mesa.

If anyone is interested in having a cron (per push?) job, that parses
and uploads the results for public consumption that will be amazing
;-)

Apart from the ones already mentioned here are a few more:
 - Rework/improve/add documentation: Be that the html ones in doc/ or
the doxygen (will look at/push some fixes in a second).
 - Trivial janitorial work: remove double semicolons, drop null checks
before free(), add null check after *alloc(), add missing static
and/or const notations and alike (bonus points if there's a cocci
script to check for future occurrences)
 - Run through IWYU (include what you use), split long headers into
multiple shorter ones.
 - Dead code removal: Prepend "-fdata-sections -ffunction-sections
-Wl,--print-gc-sections" to GC_SECTIONS in configure.ac and check the
output during linking

And a couple a bit more involving:
 - https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2015-July/088705.html
 - https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2015-July/088042.html

In general pick something you're keen on (even if it's the hardest
piece) and have fun hacking ;-)

-Emil