Firstly, thanks for reading this and secondly I finally got the flow of GNOME Open Source Contributions!
So after a long time of getting ignored by the maintainers (not saying the maintainers don’t pay attention but there’s a ton of new issues popping up in the app I am trying to contribute to 😅), I decided to try out something else in GNOME and by something else I mean some other issue or maybe another app altogether.
Hence I started looking for more issues with the newcomers tag but sadly there were none other than the one I made the fix for 🥲. So I did what anyone would not have done, I just closed the window and started focusing on other stuff, come on what else would you expect from a BTech CSE student getting ignored for straight 2 weeks 😂
But then yesterday (5th Feb), I opened gitlab again and seeing nothing I lost hope again but… I opened a new tab and searched this how does contributing to GNOME work?? And then I got this link as the 4th result which changed everything, literally!
This was the GNOME Project Handbook made for guiding any one be it a newcomer or a maintainer. And I don’t even qualify for a newcomer yet 😂 so I did what I do best, I just read the whole page before I came across this link which is the link for the GNOME Welcome page which is meant to specifically guide beginners. I wish I had found this earlier 😂🥲
The welcome page had a good amount of information but my eyes dragged right on the matrix chat for newcomers. Yeah there is an actual chat on the matrix for newcomers! Which I got to know so late 🧐
So me being me I instantly joined the chat and sent this message:
Hi there, I am Meet and I am looking forward to contributing to GNOME. Where can I find some instructions on the flow of making a contribution? (something like first create a PR or tag a maintainer in a PR to get assigned and then something else and then the contribution is merged into the main repo)
And there were 2 maintainers online (yeah so glad 😌) and one of them then replied making a conversation a bit interesting. I asked about the flow of contribution in GNOME and it was totally different than what I expected! The flow goes like this:
Find an issue where you think you can help
Check if someone is not already working on it (you can figure this out if the issue is simple yet there have been no comments for more than 2-3 weeks about making a fix on it)
Create your fix in your own fork of the GNOME app repository
Create a Merge Request and put the issue link or number in the description (yeah GitLab is smart enough to link the MR and the PR!)
There might be changes to your proposed fix, do those
The maintainer will finally accept the merge request
You have sucessfully contributed to GNOME, now go out enjoy and dance! 😂
Go to step for a separate issue 🙃
Now after learning this I am ready to create a MR for the fix (which was a one liner waiting for almost a month now 🥲) which I will soon and let you guys know this in the upcoming blogs!
But I also need some help from you dear reader, If you are motivated enough to read these blogs which are nothing more than my mood swings 😂 you might as well be ready to start your own blog series!! So just think about this for a minute or so, what if you started your own blog series on anything could be open source contributions, could be college related stuff or maybe even just a normal dev diary where you speak out loud on how you have been upskilling all these years and how you see your future self! Trust me it helps a lot more than it might sound 😂
And if you do manage to start your own blog series I would definitely be a daily reader and I can promise that! Just put the link the comments and see your viewer count reach atleast 1 every time you write a blog!
So now that I have learned from the professionals, its time to become atleast a newcomer in this open source world! I will be writing more so do keep reading, but for now byeee 👋
Credits: Tenor
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Thanks for reading through!