Peter Marklund

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Tue Mar 24 2009 19:44:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Contributing to Rails Core

At Newsdesk we recently upgraded to Rails 2.3 and ran into a Rails bug triggered by multiple post requests in tests. I was curious to figure out why the bug occured and since I was already familiar with the Rails testing code (in test_process.rb) I was able to nail down the problem pretty quickly. Usually I would probably stopped there, but my colleague Richard encouraged me to submit a Rails patch so I walked the extra mile and wrote a little unit test for my fix. I then followed the contribution instructions to submit an issue in Lighthouse with a patch file followed by the recommended post to the Rails core mailing list. The issue was quickly assigned to Joshua Peek in the Rails core team and a few days later it was applied. It is really encouraging to see how easy it can be to contribute to Rails and that the core team actually picks up a lot of patches and applies them if only they are submitted properly. This really illustrates the power of of open source in general and Git and Rails in particular.