Re: becoming a dev

As for the question in the topic.  For becoming a developer, we have 
sort of an apprenticeship kind of phase where you submit a few patches 
and one of the developers commits them into the repository.  After a 
few good patches, one of the project leaders (Jason or Eric) makes you 
a developer and you have commit access.  For MSN stuff, the best person 
to talk to is Mark Rowe (bdash in the irc channel).

Now it sounds like you did a lot of work here, and I really hate to say 
this, but it seems like you did a lot of unnecessary work.  In the 
current CVS version (1.1-b1) Fire has an additional class 
([AIM|MSN|etc]BuddyInfoItem) tacked onto the buddyItem for special 
fields.  This class is created by the service, and only has to 
implement a few functions (populate the buddy info window and set the 
tooltip) for the rest of Fire to use it.  The idea is to keep service 
specific stuff out of the BuddyItem.  The MSNBuddyInfoItem hold the 
friendlyName for the buddy, so if you have the keep Updated boxes 
unchecked, then the buddy list will use your alias; however, the 
tooltip still displays your alias along with the one that your buddy 
set for themselves.  For example: the tooltip I have for Mark Rowe 
shows:

Mark Rowe (his MSN screenname)
bdash

Where "Mark Rowe" is my alias for him and bdash is the one he set.
You may want to look at this class as it is a better place for 
additional information.  Secondly, I (other devs may disagree) would 
prefer to not change the BuddyItem because it is going to change quite 
dramatically for version 1.2 (already coded and getting some 
preliminary testing).  Now don't get discouraged by what I have said 
here.  We would gladly welcome new developers and there may be 
something more to what you described that I missed.  At the least, make 
a patch to put in the sourceforge patch tracker for the fire project 
and we will look at it:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=33772&atid=409172

On Oct 31, 2004, at 9:07 PM, Alexei Svitkine wrote:

> Hey, I'm interested in becoming a dev for Fire, and I'm wondering what 
> I need to do to become one. I've already have some code that I would 
> like to contribute - but obviously the Fire CVS repository doesn't 
> accept anonymous commits. Basically, it always annoyed me that if you 
> set up custom Aliases for your MSN buddies, you lose all ability to 
> view the nicknames that they've manually set (the ones that show up in 
> the standard MSN client). This is actually something which already has 
> a few entries on the bugtracker/wishlists on sourceforge. So I got 
> annoyed enough to download the Fire source, mess with it, and build my 
> own copy for personal use. My changes are pretty straight forward - I 
> basically duplicated the displayName instance variable in the 
> BuddyItem class, along with its basic methods, naming the new one 
> updatedDisplayName. Then I went to the code that sets the displayName 
> on an update (only if the user has a pref checked), and made it also 
> set the updatedDisplayName to the updated name regardless of user 
> prefs, so that version on our side will always be current to what the 
> server sends as updates. Then I messed with the displaying in buddies 
> window and tooltip to include the updated name. Anyways, in my opinion 
> this should be in the main version of Fire, since at least a few users 
> have asked for this ability. How can I contribute this change to the 
> main Fire and/or maybe become a dev on the Fire team?
>
> -Myrd