Finding issues/projects to work on

About issues

Glue has an issue tracker on GitHub. In GitHub terminology, an issue can be:

  • A bug report
  • A report of installation/usage issues (not all of these end up being bugs)
  • A request for a new feature
  • A request for improved documentation

Issues can be assigned to specific people, which means that they are planning on working on it. In principle, you can pick any issue that is not already assigned! Even in the case where an issue is assigned but there has not been any recent activity, you can add a comment to ask about whether you can help with it.

Note

If you decide to work on an open issue, please leave a comment on it to make sure other people know you are doing so!

Picking an issue

Picking an issue may seem daunting, but we label issues with various tags to make it easier for you to find issues that might be interesting to you. Here are some of the labels (click on the label name to go to those issues):

  • package-novice: these are issues that do not require you to know much about glue before starting (there are also matching package-intermediate and package-expert labels)
  • non-gui: these are issues that don’t require any knowledge of how to do GUI programming (including Qt). Some of these may of course be hard for other reasons, but there are also a number of reasonably straightforward issues that just need a little time spent on them.
  • bug: these are bug reports. Fixing bugs can sometimes be a nice place to start, because you don’t have to worry about creating new functionality, just fixing existing ones. However, not all bugs are easy, so make sure you check the other labels.
  • effort-low, effort-medium, and effort-high: these indicate whether the issue will likely take respectively: at most a few hours to fix, at most a few days, and more than a few days. Not all issues are labelled with these, because it’s not always easy to predict how long issues will take to tackle.
  • standalone-project: these are issues which are projects rather than simple fixes, in that they could take several days or more to implement, and they can sometimes be done in several stages. These projects are nicely isolated from the rest of the glue development, and have a well defined end goal that will result in a shiny new feature in glue. These are great issues to work on if you want to get more involved in glue development!

Note that GitHub allows you to filter by multiple labels, so you can for example search for issues that are both package-novice and non-gui

If you have other ideas of things to implement, you can of course do so, and the issue tracker is not meant to be an exhautive list. Just drop us a message on glue-viz-dev to let us know what you are working on!

Getting help

In the event that you need any advice when working on an issue, or get stuck, just leave a comment on the issue, and one of our friendly developers will help you out!