[py-dev] Contributing to py

[holger krekel]

Hello Philipp,

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 12:41 +0100, Philipp Konrad wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> my name is Philipp Konrad, I am a computer science student, a young Python
> programmer and researcher from Vienna, Austria.

welcome!

> My developer experience started around two years ago in Java, but half year
> ago I was introduced to the Python world.
> I want to contribute to the py or py.test project and can assign one
> working day per week. Generally, I never have contributed
> to an open source project, so I would need some help for my first steps.

sure.  "pytest" fits better than "py" to contribute to, i think.

>    - 1. Where is a good point to start? Is there a good site with first
>    steps, a manual or something similiar?

This depends on your prior experience.  To begin with, i assume
your have walked through http://pytest.org including some of the examples.
A few answers would help to better understand where you are starting from::

- Do you have experience in some form of automated testing? Have you
  played with nose, unittest?  Played with pytest itself?
- are you familiar with mercurial or git?  Bitbucket.org?
- Are you familiar with Python2 versus Python3 differences?
- have written docutils/RestructuredText?
- ever written a parser for configuration files?
- written a distributed application?

>    - 2. Do you have special coding / testing guidelines/ 'code of conduct'
>    additional to PEP8?

Apart from PEP8 not much apart from general good practise like e. g.
not using any global state, writing a test for each feature added/bug fixed
along with the actual change.  Usually changes are developed in bitbucket
clones and then you open a pull request.

>    - 3. In which domain do you need new people?
>    - 3.1 Code new features
>       - 3.2 Documentation
>       - 3.3 Write unit and integration tests
>       - 3.4 Translation
>       - 3.5 Community work

All of these domains make some sense.  You should probably try to tackled
an issue listed in http://bitbucket.org/hpk42/pytest/issues - this will
require reading up and understanding how pytest internally works.
 
One bigger area would be to

a) develop a pytest plugin for testing command line application
b) rewrite pytest's own tests to use the plugin

for a) i have a starting point including some specs and ideas.

Other areas include for example writing a http server that allows to
search/manage the many examples currently in sections of  the
rest-documents in doc/en/example/*.

>    - 4. Is there an organizational structure  or hierachy that I should
>    bear in mind?

Rather flat.  It's probably best if you establish an IRC presence at
irc.freenode.net .  Apart from me (hpk42) there usually are "ronny" and
"flub" who have contributed a lot of code already.  Others have helped
in various ways and may also be able to answer questions.

best,
holger