Hello,
This post is the start to a new blogging series I will be doing, and it will revolve around the work I am doing for my SPO 600 class at school. SPO 600 is the course code, and the full name is Software Portability and Optimization. The course has a public wiki page if you want to read more available here.
Lab 1 – Code Review
For this lab, I needed to find two opensource community to review how they operate. I found VSCODE and OPENCV.
VSCODE
Visual Studio Code is an open-source project run by Microsoft under the MIT license.
Contributing to VScode
VScode has the following wiki page that explains how you can help here. On the wiki is where you can learn how to file bugs or request features. It seems to be simple you list a few items that they would like you to include, but the formatting of the issue is left up to you. From what I found, the pull request has a link to the issue in them and not any more writing.
Following an Issue request
This seems to be a very active project pull request (or PR) seem to get merged or closed quickly. One thing I notice is that there is not much community PR’s what appears to happen is someone submits an issue then it gets worked on by an employee at Microsoft.
I followed Issue#80352 to see an example of the process, from the moment KamasamaK posted the issue it took about a day for sbatten who I think is a reviewer to reply. Sbatten then added someone who would be able to fix the issue. In the issue, you can see jrieken start working on a solution and then another person mjbvz joined and helped solve the problem and post the PR fixing it.
The total time to fix the issue was about five days.
OPENCV
Opencv is an open-source computer vision library for c++. I took the computer vision course at my school and learned how to use this library. It uses the BSD licence.
Contributing to OPENCV
Similar to VScode, Opencv uses a wiki page to explain how you can contribute to the project. Here is a link to the wiki. On that page, you will find how the developers would like you to send in your help. This project seems to run more on pull request then issues. From what I read on the wiki the developers seem okay with people directly sending pull request versus sending an issue then a pull request when you finish the code, but it is likely a good idea to submit an issue before you start working on it too let the developers know.
Following an Issue request
I followed Issue#15439 to see what the process is to contribute to OpenCV. The first step was for the creation of the issue about the problem, and then you can see a reviewer for OpenCV came and suggested some ideas. In this case, the person who created the issue persuaded fixing the problem and created a pull request with the required changes PR#15440. In this pull request, you can see the conversation between the person creating the pull request and the developer approving it. It took a few days of back and forth fixing the code before the pull request got merged.
The total time to fix the issue was about three days.