Contributing to OSS projects made easy

Contributing to OSS projects made easy

August 20, 2013 7:31 pm

I recently came across what I believe is a missing feature (bug?) in Json.NET most excellent library: when using custom constructor, default values are not populated for properties

Being open source, I just went to its GitHub project, created the mentioned Issue, and proceeded to fork the repo.

Immediately after getting the source and opening the VS solution, I noticed it used different settings than my default ones, i.e. it uses two whitespace “tabs”. That’s typically the first barrier to contributing: am I supposed to now go to the project website, read some coding standards page, change my VS settings to match, just to start coding?

Luckily, I also noticed alongside the solution, the Newtonsoft.Json.vssettings file. Now that’s useful! Not only that, but by being named the same as the solution file (just changing the file extension), it’s automatically picked up by the Quick Settings extension! What this means is that just by opening the Newtonsoft.Json.sln, my current settings are backed-up, the new settings are loaded, and I’m ready to code. Once I close the solution, my previously backed-up settings are re-applied and I can go on working with my own style preferences .

So, I just had to go ahead, write my repro test, fix it, push to my fork and send my pull request. Now THAT’s a great way to remove the first barrier to contributing to open source projects .

I just wish every project (including mine :S) provided this mechanism always.

/kzu