Exploring xbmc For Bugs

Our team ended up having a meeting on Sunday to discuss which bug we would like to work on.  We explored many options and already had some ideas coming into the meeting.  One of the ideas that I brought to the table was that there were some documentation errors in the readme file.  The repository that the file was pointing to was the old sourceforge one, and the current working repository is located here.  Also there was a couple of errors in the instructions for compiling the code.

After much discussion, we decided to run with this and use it as an experience to get our collective feet wet.  Just to double-check, I went into the most current readme for the Eden version of the software before we committed to doing this.  They had already fixed it!  So we dug back into the bug tracker and looked to see what kind of reported bugs were out there.

To help with this, xbmc has a convenient ticket system called their Trac system.  Using this system, a potential developer for the project such as me can scroll through all open tickets listed.  These tickets can also be filtered by a number of ways including date created, component affected, and date modified.  The first thing that we discovered was that there are a LOT of bugs to pick from.  The second was that we were going to have to be careful in choosing which bug to work on, because of the difficulty involved with some of them.

One example of one of the more cryptic ones listed says " "startup window" option does not honor skin "videos button always goes to video files" option ".  I can imagine that, having not written the code myself, this would be a hard one to track down.  So these were the things that we were dealing with when trying to sift thought the various tickets.  So in the end, we actually did not come up with a bug to start working on during the meeting.  This was due to the readme bug already being fixed and the overwhelming amount of bugs listed on the bug tracker.  Hopefully we will be able to narrow it down during the week and come up with something by Friday.