In my last post, I talked about how the rebuilding of kw patch-hub was going. With the start of the second semester in my post-graduation and the enrollment in the Advanced Topics on Software Engeneering subject, I came in contact with three great developers who will help me in this rebuilding effort. This marks the start of the new kw patch-hub as a dedicated Free Software project, and this post is meant to talk about how this exciting collaborative work started.
kw patch-hub as a dedicated Free Software project
As a product of my GSoC23 project, I’ve developed a prototype of kw patch-hub, a Terminal User Interface to lore.kernel.org, aiming to streamline some workflows of Linux kernel developers (especially the maintainers).
This TUI app was implemented just like any other kw feature, which (in simple terms) means that:
- Its implementation resides in the
kwmain project codebase. - It was developed entirely in Bash script.
patch-hub was a feature that significantly diverged from the other features from kw, as it was a screen-driven feature with a much broader scope. So, point number one became an issue because the feature started growing uncontrollably and in dissonance with the rest of the codebase.
Point number two represented another dead-end but in the sense of the performance of Bash script for the tasks entailed in the app. Even with much time spent on optimization, the prototype had an unacceptable performance.
A few weeks before, during the weekly meeting of kw, we decided to create a dedicated project for the new patch-hub (which I explain in detail in this post) inside the kworkflow organization.
Advanced Topics on Software Engeneering
To quickly introduce the context in which this collaborative work sprouted, I am coursing a discipline called Advanced Topics on Software Engeneering, which, in a nutshell, is intended for students experienced in software engineering and free software.
Every student/group is supposed to interact with a free software community and foster collaborative work in the ecosystem. What I mean by this mouthful is that, in my group’s case, we are kickstarting a new free software project.
This free software project is the new kw patch-hub, and although I used the word “kickstarted”, it inherits much of the processes and practices of its “parent” project, the original kw. This, coupled with my experience in maintaining kw, means we won’t waste much time assessing how to bootstrap the project and focus more on building it.
The Dream Team
My group is composed of four integrants:
- davidbtadokoro (me)
- OJarrisonn
- th-duvanel
- lorenzoberts
I’ve omitted their real names to preserve their privacy and only used their GitHub nicknames.
I know my three colleagues from past interactions, and I can confidently say that their technical and (most importantly) collaborative skills are more than adequate for our task.
Heating-up this community
Besides my work on the project, which has been continuous since the start of July, all three colleagues have already produced meaningful contributions, considering that we had our first conversation just the week before.
OJarrisonn had two merged PRs:
th-duvanel also had two merged PRs:
lorenzoberts studied the codebase to find many weak points, and we had a tremendous offline discussion on those.
Conclusion
I couldn’t ask for a better start for the new kw patch-hub!
I feel like my team and I will have great experiences working together and, hopefully, get patch-hub into the state it deserves.
Shortly, I will probably post about what milestones we aim to reach with updates on the development.