HI all,
A few weeks have gone by so I will try to resume what happenned concisely:
I have worked on a C++ package named stopmotion which failed to build because of a failed assert. It first seemed like the code was poorly documented but I ended up thinking my code analysis techniques were inefficient. Looking at the call graph is what helped me most identify the source of the problem. I had to learn the inner working of other packages used such as Qt which is for making unit tests for your code. after 1 1/2 - 2 weeks i went bnack to check the package status and realized I got bypassed and the package had been fixed by the maintainer and been built. This is a tricky situation as we do not have constant contact with the maintainer, you always have to make sure you can fix the package in a reasonable time, just by looking at the failed-build log. I learned that at a cost.
I jumped onto another package (vulkan) that had similar issues as the first one I worked on so I knew i would be able to deliver something faster than the last one. And I did. I identified the same kind of problem and reported it as a bug using the bug report system.
I wrote my report and added a section to the mips port web page to facilitate newcomers integration and provided information that may help them get going faster than I did
Had a blast doing this project and learned a lot about package maintaining and work practices.
Thank you all for supporting eachother during this experience,
Jonathan Jackson
GSoC 2016