Carnegie Mellon Students looking for help

[Anthony Hugh]

Hi,

My name is Anthony Hugh and I am a student at Carnegie Mellon University.
I am currently enrolled in a course called "Foundations of Software
Engineering."  One of the projects for the semester is to work with an
Open Source project and ultimately get some code into the code base.  I am
working with Mark Thurman, another student enrolled in the course.

Mark and I were wondering if someone could help us get started.  We were
looking for someone that could point us
in the right direction and help us find some areas where we could
contribute.  Our project need not be a big contribution (a couple of bug
fixes is fine), but it does ultimately need to make it into the code base.
Our deadline is November 24, roughly one month from now.

Some bugs we thought would be manageable in that time frame were


1577:  Sort groups alphabetically.
9422:  Sort in "New Instant Message"
2434:  Add chatroom buddy to blist by dragging
1787:  Replace smilies while typing
3329:  Autocompletion of screennames with spaces


Any help would be appreciated.


Thanks,
Anthony Hugh


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[Mark Doliner]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Anthony Hugh <ahugh@...> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> My name is Anthony Hugh and I am a student at Carnegie Mellon University.
> I am currently enrolled in a course called "Foundations of Software
> Engineering."  One of the projects for the semester is to work with an
> Open Source project and ultimately get some code into the code base.  I am
> working with Mark Thurman, another student enrolled in the course.
>
> Mark and I were wondering if someone could help us get started.  We were
> looking for someone that could point us
> in the right direction and help us find some areas where we could
> contribute.  Our project need not be a big contribution (a couple of bug
> fixes is fine), but it does ultimately need to make it into the code base.
> Our deadline is November 24, roughly one month from now.

That's a cool idea for a class.

> Some bugs we thought would be manageable in that time frame were
>
> 1787:  Replace smilies while typing

I don't recommend this one.  It's probably a little tricky, and we
might be drastically changing how we input text (from using our home
grown gtkimhtml widget to using webkit), and it probably doesn't make
sense to add this feature to the current code.

> 1577:  Sort groups alphabetically.
> 9422:  Sort in "New Instant Message"
> 2434:  Add chatroom buddy to blist by dragging
> 3329:  Autocompletion of screennames with spaces

I'm not really familiar with these, but they seem reasonable.

It might be good to start off with something REALLY small, just to
keep familiar with getting our source code, compiling, installing,
running, etc.  Maybe strip leading and trailing whitespace from the
three fields in our Add Buddy dialog when the user clicks the "Add"
button?

-Mark

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[Eoin Coffey]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 3:27 PM, Mark Doliner <mark@...> wrote:

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Anthony Hugh <ahugh@...> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My name is Anthony Hugh and I am a student at Carnegie Mellon University.
> I am currently enrolled in a course called "Foundations of Software
> Engineering."  One of the projects for the semester is to work with an
> Open Source project and ultimately get some code into the code base.  I am
> working with Mark Thurman, another student enrolled in the course.
>
> Mark and I were wondering if someone could help us get started.  We were
> looking for someone that could point us
> in the right direction and help us find some areas where we could
> contribute.  Our project need not be a big contribution (a couple of bug
> fixes is fine), but it does ultimately need to make it into the code base.
> Our deadline is November 24, roughly one month from now.

That's a cool idea for a class.

> Some bugs we thought would be manageable in that time frame were
>

> 1787:  Replace smilies while typing

I don't recommend this one.  It's probably a little tricky, and we
might be drastically changing how we input text (from using our home
grown gtkimhtml widget to using webkit), and it probably doesn't make
sense to add this feature to the current code.

> 1577:  Sort groups alphabetically.
> 9422:  Sort in "New Instant Message"
> 2434:  Add chatroom buddy to blist by dragging

> 3329:  Autocompletion of screennames with spaces

I'm not really familiar with these, but they seem reasonable.

It might be good to start off with something REALLY small, just to
keep familiar with getting our source code, compiling, installing,
running, etc.  Maybe strip leading and trailing whitespace from the
three fields in our Add Buddy dialog when the user clicks the "Add"
button?

-Mark

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Also give yourself time for submitted patches to receive feedback and potentially go through a few iterations of change / submit / feedback 

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[Etan Reisner-2]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 04:26:21PM -0400, Anthony Hugh wrote:
<snip>
> 1577:  Sort groups alphabetically.
> 9422:  Sort in "New Instant Message"
> 2434:  Add chatroom buddy to blist by dragging
> 3329:  Autocompletion of screennames with spaces
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Anthony Hugh

I think fixing #3329 would be great, it is an unfortunate limitation at
the moment, but I'm unsure what the best solution to the problem is.
Modifying our matching algorithm to ignore spaces in nicknames for
matching (as suggested by the poster of the ticket) is one reasonable
solution but I wonder if there are others that would also work.

I think #2434 is likely both less helpful (we have a right-click menu item
for Add) as well as harder to do since drag-and-drop is trickier and this
will not work for all chats as the chatroom nickname does not always
contain enough information to actually add the buddy with.

Without looking I'm not at all sure what would be involved in doing #9422.

While I think that there is merit to wanting groups sorted automatically
(#1577) I think that most people tend to have many many fewer groups than
buddies and that managing their sort order by hand is eminently doable.
There are also fewer possible sorting options for groups that I can
imagine people wanting (other than Manual and Alphabetically I can only
really think of By Account and I think that's a bit of a stretch) so I'm
not sure adding the sort of sorting system we have for buddies makes
nearly as much sense (not to mention the added confusion of having two
sorting systems active in the buddy list at one time).

    -Etan

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[Anthony Hugh-2]

Thanks for all the quick responses.  We worked on ticket #3329 and submitted a patch. 

Right now, we're trying to get a second bug fix in for the assignment.  We're working on ticket #9422 (Sort in "New Instant Message" and we're having a little trouble finding the callback function on the "Name" textbox.  We see that it gets created via the "pidgin_dialogs_im" function in gtkdialogs.c.  We also saw that in gtkrequest.c:1109, pidgin_request_fields fills in the call back functions for the ok button and the cancel button.  We can't seem to find where the "Name" textbox functions are though.  Could someone give us some insights on where to look?

Thanks,
Anthony Hugh

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 10:51 PM, Etan Reisner <pidgin@...> wrote:

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 04:26:21PM -0400, Anthony Hugh wrote:
<snip>

> 1577:  Sort groups alphabetically.
> 9422:  Sort in "New Instant Message"
> 2434:  Add chatroom buddy to blist by dragging
> 3329:  Autocompletion of screennames with spaces
>

> Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Anthony Hugh

I think fixing #3329 would be great, it is an unfortunate limitation at
the moment, but I'm unsure what the best solution to the problem is.
Modifying our matching algorithm to ignore spaces in nicknames for
matching (as suggested by the poster of the ticket) is one reasonable
solution but I wonder if there are others that would also work.

I think #2434 is likely both less helpful (we have a right-click menu item
for Add) as well as harder to do since drag-and-drop is trickier and this
will not work for all chats as the chatroom nickname does not always
contain enough information to actually add the buddy with.

Without looking I'm not at all sure what would be involved in doing #9422.

While I think that there is merit to wanting groups sorted automatically
(#1577) I think that most people tend to have many many fewer groups than
buddies and that managing their sort order by hand is eminently doable.
There are also fewer possible sorting options for groups that I can
imagine people wanting (other than Manual and Alphabetically I can only
really think of By Account and I think that's a bit of a stretch) so I'm
not sure adding the sort of sorting system we have for buddies makes
nearly as much sense (not to mention the added confusion of having two
sorting systems active in the buddy list at one time).

   -Etan

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[Etan Reisner-2]

On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 03:18:53PM -0500, Anthony Hugh wrote:

> Thanks for all the quick responses.  We worked on ticket #3329 and submitted
> a patch.
>
> Right now, we're trying to get a second bug fix in for the assignment.
> We're working on ticket #9422 (Sort in "New Instant Message" and we're
> having a little trouble finding the callback function on the "Name"
> textbox.  We see that it gets created via the "pidgin_dialogs_im" function
> in gtkdialogs.c.  We also saw that in gtkrequest.c:1109,
> pidgin_request_fields fills in the call back functions for the ok button and
> the cancel button.  We can't seem to find where the "Name" textbox functions
> are though.  Could someone give us some insights on where to look?
>
> Thanks,
> Anthony Hugh

The line from pidgin_dialogs_im that is the "magic" line here is
purple_request_field_set_type_hint. If you look at
gtkrequest.c:setup_entry_field you will see that it calls
purple_request_field_get_type_hint (it is generally a fair bet that a
_set_ function has a matching _get_ function) and that when the field hint
has a prefix that matches "screenname" it does some stuff ending with a
call to pidgin_setup_screenname_autocomplete_with_filter (which is in
gtkutils.c). After a series of contortions that adds the necessary data to
the gtk_list_store and sets the sort column on the tree store.

Depending on what aspect of the request in #9422 you want to add you are
going to need to do different things.

Displaying the status would likely require a fair bit of work as I don't
imagine (though I haven't checked) that the GtkEntryCompletion stuff
supports showing complex completion results (beyond the matching text).
Which means it would require a custom completion implementation (or
similar solution to work).

Sorting by some other criteria should be considerably simpler, if the data
is already in the tree model then simply modifying the sort column should
make it work. If the data isn't in the tree model then it needs to be
added and the sort column needs to be updated.

    -Etan

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[Sadrul Habib Chowdhury]

* Etan Reisner had this to say on [23 Nov 2009, 23:58:16 -0500]:

> On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 03:18:53PM -0500, Anthony Hugh wrote:
> > Thanks for all the quick responses.  We worked on ticket #3329 and submitted
> > a patch.
> >
> > Right now, we're trying to get a second bug fix in for the assignment.
> > We're working on ticket #9422 (Sort in "New Instant Message" and we're
> > having a little trouble finding the callback function on the "Name"
> > textbox.  We see that it gets created via the "pidgin_dialogs_im" function
> > in gtkdialogs.c.  We also saw that in gtkrequest.c:1109,
> > pidgin_request_fields fills in the call back functions for the ok button and
> > the cancel button.  We can't seem to find where the "Name" textbox functions
> > are though.  Could someone give us some insights on where to look?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Anthony Hugh
>
> The line from pidgin_dialogs_im that is the "magic" line here is
> purple_request_field_set_type_hint. If you look at
> gtkrequest.c:setup_entry_field you will see that it calls
> purple_request_field_get_type_hint (it is generally a fair bet that a
> _set_ function has a matching _get_ function) and that when the field hint
> has a prefix that matches "screenname" it does some stuff ending with a
> call to pidgin_setup_screenname_autocomplete_with_filter (which is in
> gtkutils.c). After a series of contortions that adds the necessary data to
> the gtk_list_store and sets the sort column on the tree store.
>
> Depending on what aspect of the request in #9422 you want to add you are
> going to need to do different things.
>
> Displaying the status would likely require a fair bit of work as I don't
> imagine (though I haven't checked) that the GtkEntryCompletion stuff
> supports showing complex completion results (beyond the matching text).
> Which means it would require a custom completion implementation (or
> similar solution to work).
>

#5936 discusses something similar. I don't seem to have the code for the
screenshot posted in there, but it demonstrates that it should be
possible, technically, to do some nifty stuff. However, I don't think we
would want the dialog to be too cluttered with too much information.

Cheers,
Sadrul

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