Gift Coding Tasks

New contributors should begin by installing ruby 1.8 and rails 2.3.5 (we only use libraries from Debian stable) and postgres on their machine and following a basic tutorial to get acquainted with the language and framework.

Next they should learn to use Git and clone the fgdb.rb repository. README_FOR_APP and install_process from the doc directory have install instructions.

Before commit rights are given for our repository changes can be sent as patches created with git format-patch or can be pushed to a git repository somewhere else (github, for example).

The gift tasks are bugs that are suitable for new contributors:

• code reviewing the new freekbox home page and checking validates and suggesting some tweaks or improvements
  • this is in the freegeek-extras repository and doesn't involve ruby/rails/fgdb.rb
• #16671 ask for cashier code on destroy
  • is javascript/ajax stuff. having the code add an additional prompt (possibly in a loop repeating until success) and append that to the URL parameters of the "delete" request for transaction, if that transaction type is set to use cashier codes (a helper function tells this).
• #22313 xhtml validation errors
  • is a good one to get acquainted with the code all over. just messing around and fixing validation errors anywhere in the application.
• #19348 csv output on searches
  • I keep trying to do this but get distracted by other things. should be based on the transaction search results logic (and linked to from there, with a "csv format" link that passes the params[:conditions], no need for a new form). will basically just involve making use of a csv library, fgdb's sql conditions code, and fgdb's column class (it can use the same set of columns as the search results do at first).
• #20108 clean up the volunteer_tasks table
  • SQLy/data cleanup, but pretty simple and straightforward I think. Might need to be discussed/checked into first. it would be a good task for learning the schema (and migrations/models) while doing something useful.

Not quite gift tasks yet:

• hiding inactive workers in skedjulnator's interface
  • I think this is done already?
• #15034 add show more button on contact search
  • it currently limits the autocomplete results to a certain number, but there might be situations where we need to see a contact further down in the list
  • On second thought, this might not be a good one, I think the autocomplete javascript library might make this hard to do...

"Gift tasks" idea stolen from: http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/GiftTag