[scribus-dev] Easy Hacks?

[JLuc]

Le 16/10/2015 14:43, Khaled Hosny a écrit :
> I’m working with a group of fresh graduates in Oman under an initiative from
> the Information Technology Authority to encourage participation in FLOSS
> development, and Scribus is one of the projects we are targeting (as
> some might already know).
>
> We are looking for something like LibreOffice’s Easy Hacks to help
> introduce the students to the codebase, and have been told that some
> people are working on such a list. Most importantly it should be things
> that the core team finds useful and are welling to integrate reasonable
> patches addressing them (otherwise it will be a wasted effort, of
> course).

Hello,
wellcome to your fresh graduates in the scribus world :-)

There is an 'easyhack' tag on the bug tracker, but it's allmost empty.
So maybe we should use it more often !

It's not so easy to find bugs that are both easy hacks
and that have been 'confirmed' by a trunk dev.

I found one : suggest http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=11526
A patch has allready been proposed by sarathms ;
jghali showed interest and requested some improvement ;
but patch remained unchanged and as a consequence, it was not merged.
It's probably quite easy to update the patch to current 1.5 svn,
and add the requested improvement...


AMOF ghost patches are a fruitfull track for easyhacks :

http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=12007
features some existing not so old patches,
some of which are interesting IMO :
-  Show soft hyphen in the story editor (as red dash)
- Prevent hyphenation on on per-word basis (using a soft hyphen before the word).

http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=10409
was quite close to being merged.


As for other easy hacks, you could search for reproduceable crashes :
quite often crashes are due to strictly C or C++ issues
like not cleaning or initialising a variable,
and fixing these does not require to be a master of Scribus and Qt code.
Correct C++ knowledge and big source management knowledge can be enough.
The bug tracker will provide you with a bunch of crashing bugs.
Among them, take a nicely described one or one with a backtrace provided,
try to reproduce it, and go for it.

As for crashes, it would be usefull to fix the crashes about footnotes.
footnotes are treacherous a feature because they are both powerfull...
and unstable. I never use them, which is a pity coz they're allmost very nice.
They probably need a global refactoring, but fixing the crashes
would be nice enough for the next couple of decades.
For a start see http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=11765

Other texts 'marks' are a good test zone for crashing bugs also...


In any case, if you work on any of the tracked bugs,
leave comments on the tracker, so as to confirm that you can reproduce them,
or also to explain that you cannot reproduce them.
Even if you dont provide a patch for these bugs,
such comments will help clean the bug tracker and concentrate on the worst bugs.

And in any cases, keep in touch.
Provide feedbacks on your works.
Publish your patches on the bug tracker or wherever you want
and share links and thoughts.

JL