FOSS contributions - Next steps with KW
As someone still interested to keep contributing to the Linux ecossystem, but not really into contributing to the kernel itself, there are a lot of ways we can help to build this empire apart from the very kernel.
One of these ways is to help the development of tools some Linux developers use, such as kworkflow. I’ve decided to keep working and cotributing to kworkflow because I am a big fan of shell scripts as tools to automate tasks for our desktop and workflow environments and, even though I’m not a Linux developer myself, I do believe that Linux plays a massive important role for us nowadays and I want to keep learning and contributing to this amazing ecossystem.
Since we have already made previous contributions to kw, we already have a basic understanding of project’s structure, workflow and contribution process. On this blog post I’m going to present some new updates PR’s we have been working on.
Improving ‘kw maintainers’ test coverage
The kw maintainers feature lacks tests for its multiple corner cases where it should fail. Adding such tests ensures a larger test coverage for expected behaviors of this feature, possibly preventing future accidental undesirable changes.
We’ve open a pull-request which raids this exact problem: kworkflow/pull/1118.
The idea itself is rather simple, even so it’s quite hard to get your PR accepted in the first try. We’ve got some suggestion from Rodrigo Siqueira and possible additional changes we can make with test script, since it’s a very old file that hasn’t been properly maintained for a long time.
[Update] This contribution was accepted
This contribution was accepted and the commit in the upstream project can be found here: defa94039155
Handling trailer lines with kw
Both #1049 and #1051 represent similar issues, regarding trailer line manipulation of commits and patches. The idea is to deliver a new feature that can make such tasks easier and quicker to deal with.
However, my group and I are not totally sure how this should be implemented. If we should create a new features such as kw handle-trailer or implement this inside an already existing kw’s feature.
We have decided to go with the first idea and have open this pull-request: kworkflow/pull/1121.
I’m still unsure about this name though. Some ideas I heard from friends are:
kw annotatekw amendkw tagkw signature
It’s still too early to tell if this PR will be accepted or not at the moment. I’ll be making a new blog post telling how this feature development is going on and if we should be optimistc about it getting accepted or not.