Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

I submitted a patch several weeks ago, and it was horrible. Here's how it went down:

1. Navigate ImageMagick's terrible website for half an hour looking for the repository
2. Discover that it's subversion, groan
3. Grab the repo and make my changes, produce a patch
4. Realize that subversion patches are unattributed, groan some more
5. Google "ImageMagick mailing list", find a page full of dead links
6. Try the second result, page full of dead links
7. Spend an hour navigating aforementioned terrible website looking for how to submit a patch
8. Do not find it on "Support ImageMagick" (I did find a paragraph telling me that I could help by contributing code, but not telling me how)
9. Do not find it on the "Install from Source" page
10. Check subversion history to see if SVN shows committer emails, find none
11. Browse this forum, no one is submitting patches
12. See "contact the wizards" hidden at the bottom of the page, decide to ask where I can send patches
13. Grimace at ridiculous "authentication code", click drop-down and see "Source or Documentation patch"
14. Stare at the screen in annoyance for a few minutes
15. Copy patch to my clipboard and dump it into the contact form
16. Hit send
17. Never hear back from anyone about it
18. Several weeks pass
19. Remember that I sent a patch a while ago
20. Find the subversion repo again, notice that my patch has been applied and has been in two releases of ImageMagick, and there's no attribution like you see with git
21. Make a forum account just to complain about this bulls**t

Here's how it should have happened:

1. Open ImageMagick's helpful and easy-to-use website
2. Find the git repository within moments, clone it and write the patch
3. Subscribe to the mailing list, also very easy to find
4. Email patch to mailing list
5. Thank ImageMagick developers after they inform me that the patch has been merged

It's like you're actually trying to make it difficult for people to give you code.

Post any ImageMagick patches to the Bugs forum if you think you have found and fixed a bug or security vulnerability. Post to the Developers forum if you have a patch for a proposed enhancement. As part of your patch set, be sure to added an entry to the ChangeLog summarizing your patch along with your name (or pseudonym). Note, if you submit patches often, you will likely get an invite to become an ImageMagick developer and get commit access to the Subversion repository.

We got rid of the mailing lists sometime ago because we spent too much time deleting spam off of the list.

Use the Contact the Wizards page @ http://www.imagemagick.org/script/contact.php to bring certain topics to the attention of the developers (e.g. security concerns, web page corrections / suggestions, etc.). We make it clear on that page that you'll only hear back from us if its a sponsorship, license, or security issue and we recommend the discussion server @ http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/ if you want a dialog.

Would you consider using GitHub? It makes your code easily discoverable, does not have problems with spam, and makes it easy to contribute by way of pull requests. You can also do public code reviews with a nice UI and have a nice exchange with the dev offering the changes.

Here's an example of a patch submitted to one of my own open-source projects. You can have a good dialogue, bring others in, chat about specific lines of code...

You can also import your subversion history into a git repository, and then you get all the benefits of git without losing your history. Others will also be more excitied to contribute, since SVN is a pretty outdated tool that most devs don't enjoy using any more.

I'd also strongly suggest improving the website, which I'd be willing to help with, but not if the development workflow is quite this annoying.

For the short term, Subversion meets our needs and we see no reason to invest the time and energy to switch right now. We may revisit our decision in the future but not this year.

Subversion doesn't seem to be serving anyone's needs very well right now:

% svn ls https://www.imagemagick.org/subversion/ ... gick/trunk
svn: E175002: Unexpected HTTP status 405 'Method Not Allowed' on '/subversion/ImageMagick/trunk'

svn: E175002: Additional errors:
svn: E175002: PROPFIND request on '/subversion/ImageMagick/trunk' failed: 405 Method Not Allowed

magick wrote:For the short term, Subversion meets our needs and we see no reason to invest the time and energy to switch right now. We may revisit our decision in the future but not this year.

Hi guys! It's been a year.

Hey, I was looking into submitting a patch, but could not find the sources within a minute.

So one goes to http://www.imagemagick.org, Home and then searches for "git" or "source". No results. Neither for the "Download", "Download -> Install from Unix Source", "Developers" or "Resources" page. Googled for "imagemagick git", found no official results.

Finally found a SVN repo as third result at https://www.imagemagick.org/script/subversion.php only to find out that the repo is not responding.

I suggest to make the development resources more visible, putting links on the homepage, download page and maybe even the resources. Use of a modern DVCS like git also makes it easier to keep a full copy locally available, reducing the load on the servers.

Patches on this forum (which is attacked by spam bots) is also not sustainable. Github for issue tracking and handling code review works pretty well and is quite inviting, but Gerrit Code Review is also nice (you can see it in action at https://code.wireshark.org/review/).

We're just a week or two from hosting the ImageMagick repository on Github, the work is already in progress but got delayed because of a technical glitch which we have since resolved.

The SVN repository is down now because we are upgrading our internet connection. It will be online, likely within two days.

Moving to git? That is awesome! I guess patches can watch that long

What do you think about giving the source repository a more prominent position on the website?

Sounds fine with us. We've run out of real estate on the header and footer navigation sections. If we add any more, it likely won't fit on a mobile phone. We could add it to the Download or Develop pages near the top. What's your preference?

Just to be clear we are not moving to git. We will host a mirror of our svn repository at github for now. We will be watching pull request but they will be committed in the svn repository and 'copied' to github. Not saying we will never move to git but this will be it for now.

I was thinking of some text on the download page, such as: That link should point to a friendly interface, but since none of the UIs are as pretty as cgit/gitweb, it is probably better to link to https://www.imagemagick.org/script/subversion.php which can then mention http://trac.imagemagick.org/browser/ImageMagick/trunk and the Github mirror (taking Lemstra's comment into account).

A CONTRIBUTING document would also be more welcoming/helpful to new people like me.

"Does copied to github" mean manually making a patch, then applying it to svn? Git has pretty good svn integration: AFAIK the author information is lost though, the user who checks out the svn repo will appear as committer. In that regard, git is better.

For those who cannot get used to git, github provides a svn interface to git repos as well: https://help.github.com/articles/suppor ... n-clients/. Not trying to sound too pushy, I would just like to mention something for consideration.

It won't be a two way sync. We will look at the pull request and commit the patches to svn. Author information will be lost for now.

The mirror has been created and can be found here: https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick. Have fun!

Thanks