Wednesday 22 May 2013

Hacking from a phone, not the easiest

Recently I've had two people fork and contribute to an open source project I created to add GitHub integration to Linux Mint, inparticularly cinnamon the replacement window manger. Not only was it great to find some people actually using my app but I also really appreciated GitHub for its social and open nature. Using it in a closed cooperate environment does work but when you sit next to the people who are working on the same code its always best to speak to someone in person as opposed to simply commenting. However this isn't always possible and GitHub provides a good medium for this. Both contributions came from forks woth pull requests which allowed for good two way communication and code reviews etc. The problem I did have is that as I'm travelling I have no access to my linux mint install, my GitHub, development and testing tools so it had to be checked, merged and released from my phone, it took a very long time! Hacking from my phone was hardly hacking as the toolset available to me a text editor, zip/unzip application, browser and GitHub app (which has limited functionality). I managed to check the code on the pull request, do some reading, merge it in to master and when it came to a release I downloaded and extracted the zip of the main repo, copied some files to a new folder, tweaked some text and zipped it back up. I also sent it to one of the contributors for a quick test. I can upload the zip with the browser and hopefully a new version will be out and have some new features and bug fixes. Not bad from a phone I reckon!

James