[infinityloop]

Patch Guidelines - and how to find something to work on

We appreciate every help we get from our community. Especially if we receive patches.
If you are a developer and want to contribute to this project, then you might wonder what you could do.
Your first stop should be our Mantis bug tracker. Or the roadmaps to be more specific.

Roadmaps:

1. MediaPortal 1
2. TV-Server
3. DeployTool / NSIS

There you can find all the confirmed bugs and new features the team agreed to add.
If an issue was not yet assigned to a developer, then you can give it a try if you want.
If it is a time-consuming change, then it would be wise to start a work in progress thread, to avoid that someone else starts to work on the same issue.

But to get a patch into our svn, a few criteria have to be met.
This is why we have created a ::description in our wiki:: which explains the patch process from start to end in detail.
Please read ::this description:: and follow it if you are going to submit a patch.

[arion_p]

What about patches already submitted to the patch queue. Will they be considered or do we need to resubmit them here too?

Also what about minor fixes (e.g. 1-2 lines of code) that have already been posted in the (old) bug reporting forums or the development forums?

Thanks,

Arion

[infinityloop]

Originally Posted by arion_p

What about patches already submitted to the patch queue. Will they be considered or do we need to resubmit them here too?

reason why we now handle patches here is that on sourceforge, communication is a problem.
also developers look more into the forums than on the SF page. but the allready submitted patches on SF do not have to be added here again.
would cause some confusin to have them twice i think.

Originally Posted by arion_p

Also what about minor fixes (e.g. 1-2 lines of code) that have already been posted in the (old) bug reporting forums or the development forums?

Bugreportforums are definitly the wrong place to submit patches.
you can ask an moderator to move threads from the "general development" forum to this one here. but make sure that you edit the first post to match the patch-guideline before doing so.
Our devs request to only receive .patch files here.
I do not know what will happen if you post the "plain code" for small changes you were talking about.

[tourettes]

Originally Posted by infinityloop

Bugreportforums are definitly the wrong place to submit patches.
you can ask an moderator to move threads from the "general development" forum to this one here. but make sure that you edit the first post to match the patch-guideline before doing so.

I think it would be even better to create a new thread in this section and just point the "old" thread in bug forums as an additional information. Just to make sure that this forum part is not going to get cluttered with user comments etc. and thus making this section less interested for the developers.

I do not know what will happen if you post the "plain code" for small changes you were talking about.

Patch creation is almost automatic with Tortoise, so no plain text patches should be posted. Same amount that the patch poster is saving when he/she doesn't create the .patch file is already going to be wasted few times when developer finds the correct file in VS

[tourettes]

Please note that following addition to the patch submission guidelines has been added:

When changing or adding functionality you are obligated to provide documentation update for the wiki. It is enough to write all the needed documentation changes inside tags in the same forum thread where the patch itself is provided. (For example adding a new feature into the skinning engine or changing the existing behavior of skinning engine requires the wiki update always).

Keeping the documentation up to date is as important as the code improvements.