I would like to contribute to the development of rails.

[pankaj]

I would like to contribute to the development of rails.
What are the prerequisites for it. Please guide.
Regards,
Pankaj

[Manfred Stienstra]

Hi Pankaj,

There are no prerequisites to contribute code. If you have something
you would like to fix or add, follow the following guidelines:

http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/sending-patches

You can find open tickets here:

http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/tickets

Manfred

[pankaj]

thanks Manfred,

By prerequisites i meant, technical knowledge required.
Although I know ruby and rails, I have not looked much inside the
rails framework( the code).
What do you suggest should be the path to start contributing.
I am reading Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen. Have also gone
through The Ruby Way.
Any other book or suggestions which will help contributing to rails
are welcome.

Pankaj

[Frederick Cheung]

On 25 Jan 2009, at 11:20, pankaj wrote:

>
> thanks Manfred,
>
> By prerequisites i meant, technical knowledge required.
> Although I know ruby and rails, I have not looked much inside the
> rails framework( the code).
> What do you suggest should be the path to start contributing.
> I am reading Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen. Have also gone
> through The Ruby Way.
> Any other book or suggestions which will help contributing to rails
> are welcome.

Use the source luke! The best way to understand rails is to read
rails. I would advise (at least that's how I got started) to do that
in narrow vertical slices, ie pick something in rails that annoys you
then step through the code (mentally or with a debugger) and try and
understand how the annoying behaviour arises.

Fred

[Martijn Vos]

That's kinda what I'm doing with date_select at the moment, I think.
I'm working on a site that handles date fields in a different way
each time, which on its own is probably not all that smart (but I do
need something different every time), but it also means I keep
running into lots of obscure little bugs in date_helper.rb.

I created two tickets for bugs I found (1715 and 1824), and submitted
patches for them.

I opened first on january 9th, but so far nobody has even commented
on it. So now I'm wondering: should I announce my tickets and patches
on this list to get attention? Or will someone pick them up sooner
or later?

Also, how much of a problem is it that I don't include tests for my
patches? I notice other patches have them, but I haven't fogured
out how to do proper tests yet. I just check if they fix my problem
and try to write my patch so it's least likely to break anything for
anyone else.

mcv.

[Clemens Kofler]

Martijn,

from my experience I can tell you that tests are definitely needed.
They're not a pre-requisite for your ticket being looked at but
definitely a must for a patch being accepted. Plus, you should
actually supply breaking tests as a proof for a bug before fixing it -
in the spirit of TDD.

I don't know if this is still true (it's been a while since my last
contribution), but I think you need three people to +1 your suggestion/
patch before core team members look at it. Another option would be to
announce tickets in the rails-contrib IRC channel.

- Clemens