submit a patch?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Short version: How do I submit a patch?

Long version: I hit an error with Rails 2.3 on Ruby 1.9.1, debugged it, and fixed it locally. Now, I'd like to open a bug report and submit a patch, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how.

I'm watching a RailsCast, but every little step is taking hours. The lighthouse site was down (but is back up now), I didn't have (and had never used) git, I just spent an hour getting mysql [1] installed (since the RailsCast claims it's required by rails self-test suite), and now rails test is failing with a bug that somebody else apparently reported yesterday against Netbeans (which I'm not using). [2]

1. Btw, why doesn't mysql on OS X read ~/.inputrc? GNU readline is installed.

2. http://forums.netbeans.org/post-26407.html

2

Jeff Schwab wrote:

Short version: How do I submit a patch?

Submitted ticket 2130, and attached the patch. http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/tickets/2130

If anybody here knows what they're doing and would care to close the ticket, please be my guest.

$ svn diff vendor/rails/railties/lib/commands/plugin.rb Index: vendor/rails/railties/lib/commands/plugin.rb

3

There are a few technical considerations to look at, which I've added to #2130. However, on a procedural note, Git is pretty much required to submit patches.

Good start on the patch - thanks!

--Matt Jones

4

Hi, I would recommend the following railscasts:

Contributing to Rails with Git

Good luck,

-Conrad

5

Matt Jones wrote:

6

Jeff Schwab wrote:

Matt Jones wrote:

Submitted ticket 2130, and attached the patch.

There are a few technical considerations to look at, which I've added to #2130. However, on a procedural note, Git is pretty much required to submit patches.

Understood. That's my next step. I've been getting bitten by "technical considerations" on that front, too, but I'm hoping to have it working later today.

What's the right way to test this fix? I don't see any tests for class RailsEnvironment.

7

Hi, I really liked Ryan Bates approach by writing the test first to verify that

his enhancement doesn’t exist and fails. It really depends on what you fixed

and how.

Good luck,

-Conrad

8

I'd argue that since this is essentially just a Ruby 1.9 compatibility thing, that it shouldn't really need testing. Especially if you adopt the approach used earlier in the same file.

--Matt Jones

9

If and only if, the test already exists.

-Conrad

10

I jump the gun on the send button. Anyway, I feel that all enhancements and bug

fixes should have an associated test that validates the fix or enhancement with

even in the case where it happens to be Ruby 1.9 compatibility. Why? If you fix

something and/or add a feature without a test, one wouldn’t be able to verify that it

works from release to release. Furthermore, I would rather catch a development

error in development rather than production.

Just my 2 cents,

-Conrad

11

Matt Jones wrote:

I'd argue that since this is essentially just a Ruby 1.9 compatibility thing, that it shouldn't really need testing.

Agreed, although a smoke test on 1.8 would do my heart good. How does that sort of thing usually work? Are there volunteer alpha testers, or nightly regression tests, running in different environments, with different versions of Ruby?

Especially if you adopt the approach used earlier in the same file.

I'm not sure what you mean here. The relevant class, RailsEnvironment, is the first in the file (plugin.rb), and the file does not contain any mention of testing. There is a PluginTest class in plugin_test.rb, but it doesn't directly test RailsEnvironment.

The RailsEnvironment class depends inherently on the caller's environment, so this is kind of a special case. For the failure to happen, there has to be a .svn directory in "#{root}/vendor/plugins", and backtick calls to svn must work. If the user hasn't got svn installed, should we mock out a stub just for this test? I see that PluginTest already uses some stubbing tools, but I'm not familiar with them.

I'm guessing that for a Ruby newbie like myself, adding the test is probably about a day's effort, and the code may not be as, uh, aesthetically pleasing as one would like. I'll give it a shot, anyway.