Is this the place to ask for programming questions?

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Sobek

Is this the place to ask for programming questions?

Post by Sobek »

Hi, I'm new to the codebase and am hoping to contribute, but my main problem so far is not knowing the intent behind certain implementations and such, so I'm not sure if something is a bug or intentional. Is this a good place to ask? I didn't figure GitHub issues were the right place for that.

For a specific issue I'm interested in learning about:
https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/5097

I wanted to poke into this just to see if I can understand what's going on and where the time is being spent. I think I found this, but I have to assume the current implementation is the way it is for a reason (I noticed the implementation is similar to libtorrent's docs for save_resume_data), and I don't have enough context to start making any informed changes. How do others start getting involved in this codebase?

Thanks!
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Peter
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Re: Is this the place to ask for programming questions?

Post by Peter »

Well, it all depends.

For example, it could be an OS related bug. It could be a networking related bug. A qt bug. A libtorrent bug.
Usually as Sledgehammer suggested, you'd use WinDbg and see what's actually happening. Since qBittorrent is open source, you can download the source, compile it and use a debugger to actually diagnose what causes this extra wait.

These advanced bugs are usually not trivial however.
Sobek

Re: Is this the place to ask for programming questions?

Post by Sobek »

Thanks for the response! I guess I'm still unclear though, is this the place to ask these kinds of questions, or is there somewhere more active? My fear, basically, is spending a lot of time working on a PR only to have it rejected because I don't understand the full context of how something works, which is easiest to get by asking the devs...is that something the devs on this project are open to, before we go to the trouble of writing a fix?

Thanks again!
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Peter
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Re: Is this the place to ask for programming questions?

Post by Peter »

- Pick an easy to fix bug. I think we have a tag like that on Github. Few things tagged with that.
- Always check how a bug got solved, or how something is implemented, so you know how to write a fix.
- Check closed and open PRs. You can see what the issues were, what directions the contributors had to follow, etc.

Don't be discouraged, the team is very helpful. Like if you mess up, they'll just say what to fix, what things you have to change, etc. They'll help you through the way if you are willing to do the work.
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