SPO600 Code Review Lab

The 1 of 2 picks for this lab is soundconverter. It is on a GPLv3 license, and their homepage can be found here.

Soundconverter uses launchpad to track their bugs, along with other features it provides to the community. While navigating that site, I was able to locate two bugs that were fixed by patches provided by members of the community; it seems in one of their translations, not everything in the GUI was translated to Hungarian from english – you can find the complete bug here.

The bug submitter is also the bug resolver (patch provider). Upon writing the patch for it, he was requested to paste it in the bug comments or “create a pull request on github”. This bug was resolved in two days, and the patch is available through the link in the comments, and under the Patch link on the right hand side. There also seems to be an option to add a patch to this bug, but requires a launchpad account.

The 2 of 2 pick for this lab is xfce4-xkb-plugin, which is licensed under BSD. The webpage for this package is here. While this package relates to keyboard layouts, XFCE provides an entire desktop interface for many Linux distributions including Fedora.

They use the all too familiar Bugzilla for their bug tracking system. Since they maintain so many packages, one can spend a day and forever going through it all. I was able to find a bug resolved with a patch. This bug involved updating an out of date library with a newer library. A community member provided the patch and Jesper Karlsson applied the patch to the master branch in git – 2 years later (according to the time stamps).

It seems both use similar processes. In both cases, the bug reporter was the same person supplying the fix to the bug. While in the first case, with soundconverter, the reporter received a reply within a day, and had their fix promptly applied, the latter took 2 years to reply (perhaps the fix was applied earlier but he never responded? – either way it was a long time).

Assuming the maintainers are available and regularly check active bugs, allowing members to create a bug and submit a fix for it right away could save many people from headaches. It would allow others who experience the same issues to quickly get resolutions or even contribute to the fix by looking at the available patch; having multiple eyes on the code helps keep it efficient and clean.

A disadvantage to this approach is that untested “fixes” is available for everyone before being fully vetted.

There is also a large list of bug reports that go unresolved from looking at the bug list on XFCE, and in the comments you can read it was “closed” from a mass old bug sweep that told users “if it was still an issue, the bug should be reopened”.

Overall the processes seem to work for anything major or critical, but some of the minor issues, or only affecting a small group of people may not see any attention.

-Richard K.