Happyness is as simple as a git:merge

07 April 2014

Not so long time ago, I’ve made a post about a fix I’ve done on XBMC, about the Wiimote driver. After few months, I could say : “It’s working pretty well!”. A complete charge can last several weeks.

Even if the ‘motto’ of the blog is : “I don’t give a fork”, I decided to do, for once. Repo forked, new branch created, changes done and committed : press “Pull request”. After some interrogations, another commit, then a squashing (I didn’t even knew that on Git) and few weeks. The pull request has been finally accepted. Apparently, the change was also fixing another issue. The driver was using 1/3 of the CPU, and now only 10%. But we need to confirm. Like my main commit. My first, proper, pulling request on a big open source project and it’s not a typo in the documentation.

<mood type=’narcissic, egocentric, d***head’ enabled> I’ve done something great. I know it’s nothing. But it feel so awesome.</mood>

Here is some reactions:

What a jerk! He just changed 3 lines on a feature that nobody use, and he feels like a boss.

My conscience

Nobody else had this issue before, and it seems to be pretty big. Impossible, it look more like a PEBCAK to me.

My nephew (9 years old)

There’s a built-in Wiimote driver in XBMC? That’s cool. Huh? I have to pull the code, compile it, set it up to start automatically? Ok, wait, what? I have to use the terminal to do that?? Nah, I’ll continue to use my smartphone as remote. That’s fine.

Standard noob

I’m happy for you Max, that’s great! I mean, you look happy! But.. what’s an XBMC, a Wiimote and a GitHub? And what did you pulled?

My Mom

Just to finish on a positive message for all the noobs around the world (like me) : don’t feel scared to contribute on a repo: it’s easy, anybody can spot something, help is always welcome, and it’s a good experience. But let’s be clear between us. Pass your time on 2048 does not give you the right to say you are a ‘tester on a hype open source project’. No, just no.