I don’t get as much of a chance these days to do things like patches or other technical contribution. But I had some time free the other day and used it to stick my hands directly into a cool project, Pagure (pronounced roughly “pag-yOOR,” or listen here). You may have read about Pagure in this Fedora Magazine article a few months back.
It was tremendously easy to get Pagure, fix a bug, test the fix, and contribute it back (see my pull request here). I specifically looked for “easyfix” bugs, since I knew I didn’t have a lot of time to spend to help. So I decided to work on this issue, a button showing up when it shouldn’t.
First I forked the repo in Pagure. Then I cloned my new fork, and set it up as documented in the README. In the clone, I checked out a new branch using the issue number as a name, issue839.
To track down the fix, I ran the app locally and duplicated the error. I looked at the CSS style containers for the button and some of the surrounding elements. Using that information, I did a text search on the code to find the file that was generating the button. Then I simply applied some logic to find the fix for the problem, even though I wasn’t really familiar with the code involved.
Thankfully Pagure has a test suite, so I could also check that my fix didn’t break any of the tests. Then I committed and pushed my changes, and made a pull request using the button in Pagure’s web page.
I also learned something useful. Since I forked the repo to do my fix and make a pull request, if I force-pushed changes using git to my branch from which I made the pull request, the pull request was automatically updated with the changes! This is probably expected by people who do this all the time, but since I’m new at it, I was excited.
Bugs like this are something that just about anyone with a small amount of beginning programming skill could fix. Pagure even has other bugs like this waiting for people to handle. Maybe one of them is waiting for you! ?