Hacktoberfest is here! In celebration of the event I have to make four meaningful Pull Requests in the month of October. I am slightly nervous about being able to make a meaningful contribution but overall I am excited to start getting involved in the open source community!
I first searched the Github issues for the Hacktoberfest label but quickly found out that the majority of issues with that label are just make work projects in order to get an easy PR. I then decided to search for the “good first issue” label. After refreshing the page a few times through the day I came across an issue that seemed to be relatively easy. A perfect place to start this journey.
The issue was made by Electron which is used to “build cross platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS”. They have hundreds of applications that use their framework to deploy their application. In order to use Electron the owner must add their information into the apps/ folder. Over time a lot of apps end up left in the directory. even after they are no longer in use. Electron is looking for people to go through that list and add a tag to any application that met the following criteria:
- Link to website no longer works
- Last release was over 4 years ago
- Using a version of Electron older than 3.x
I asked the issuer for some clarification as I was unsure if one, or all three of the criteria needed to be met. After finding out one is enough do deem broken I forked and cloned the repo and got to work.
Wow, that’s a lot of apps to go through…
I decided to just do a spin of the scroll wheel and randomly choose an app to start looking at.
I would first check the website if one was provided. If that passed or no website was provided I would then look at their Github repo. There I was looking to see when the last release date was. If all was good there I then had to dive into the package.json file to figure out what version of Electron was being used. If any of the above failed I would add the line : disabled: true followed by a comment on why I was disabling it.
The issuer only wants a maximum of five disabled apps per PR in order to let more people get involved in the process for Hacktoberfest. After finding five apps I did a commit and made the PR. There were a couple of the apps I was unsure about because even though it said they were using an older version of Electron they had new version of electron-builder, or electron-packager. So I highlighted my concern in the PR request.
When I first made the PR I noticed that one of the tests failed.
Upon digging around I found that it was because when I made the commit I did not use the proper semantics. I was in such a hurry to make my first PR that I did not follow their contribution guide…
My issue sat there for a few days and I even noticed someone else had made a PR for the same issue and had it reviewed, approved and merged even though they made the PR after I did. I was getting worried so I tried to change the title of the commit to adhere to the test.
Another day went by and finally, a reviewer has looked over my PR and approved it! I am still waiting on it to be merged but for now, it’s out of my hands.
Tim's Blog for DPS 909 