Your Position: Join Wing -> How to: Make changes to wing

How to: Make changes to wing

1. Get a copy of wing from SVN repository

In order to making changes to wing, you need first setup svn environment and download wing from repository.

Caution: It is not recommended to directly write to svn repository. Developers should follow the cycle described in this page to contribute to wing.

2. Understand what are you going to do

It is a good habit to get familiar with wing by starting with fixing a bug. You can take a look at the complete bug list and choose one of them.

On the other hand if you want to add new stuffs to wing, you need to understand the goal of wing and the current status of wing project, which may help you to make a more appropriate decision to improve wing.

Then, you can pick any one of the working features from feature list and contact the feature owner directly to start working with him/her on that feature.

If you are not interested in any of the existing working features, you may take a look at the wing user requirements collection to see what's the expectations of our users, and create a your own feature.

If you still do not know what to do. Here is a list of items that you may make contributions:

• Home page (Instructions)
• Go through home page and correct grammar mistakes, improve phrases.
• Fix dead links.
• Provide missing pages.
• Improve color, style and pictures of the home page.
• Documentation (Instructions)
• Add doxygen comments to code.
• Improve doxygen configuration file to generate better documents.
• Localization
• Write or improve localization framework.
• Translation
• Tools and Build Environment
• Coding
• Testing
• Test the application and report bug.
• Write unit test.
• Write performance test.
• Write or improve samples.
• Improve unit test and performance test framework.
• Resource Package
• Improve existing resources.
• Add new resources (Notice you must make sure the resource can be used in an open-source project under LGPL).

3. Tell other developers what are you going to do

Once you decided to fix a bug or join an existing feature, you need to add a comment to it so that everyone knows you are working on it. This step is very important because by doing so, other developers can avoid doing duplicate job.

If you start with your own feature, you need to log your feature name and detailed description of your feature at feature list page. After that, you are the feature owner and you are responsible for your feature. Please try to make your description of the feature as clear as possible, because by doing so, others can understand what are you doing and may lend a hand in your feature.

4. Do it!

You can then work directly on your local copy. Notice your changes include: major changes, documentations, unit test and examples.

5. Try not to break your word

If you are not sure whether you will work on a feature or fix a bug, don't claim that you are going to do it, don't even log a record in the feature list page. Because, if you occupy a feature but do nothing, you may potentially prohibit some one from working on that feature.

If you do have an idea and you don't want to do any specific task, please log your idea at wing user requirements collection and wait. Maybe some day some one will pick up your idea and implement it.

6. Create a patch and submit it

After you finished your task, you can create a patch and submit it to your feature/bug page. A senior developer may review your changes and give you some suggestions. It is possible to have several modifications and reviews on your code.

Finally, if your code is accepted, it will be submitted to svn repository and everyone can see your changes.