This week for my open source development class I was tasked on submitting a PR to an open repository. Let me tell you it was disappointing in the amount of code that I actual wrote but VERY educational for me to do.
The issue that I chose to take up was: https://github.com/mozilla/OpenWPM/issues/651
Just reading through the issue seems to be pretty easy, just change the numbers from 0.14 to 0.26 and update the code if needed. I thought it would be a great first pull request to start my journey into open source development - something nice and easy.
https://github.com/mozilla/OpenWPM/pull/762 So I started to look through all the files in the repo for any reference of geckodriver and geckodriver 0.14 I found 9 files, 2 of which may need to be changed.
With these two files in mind I thought about my next steps. Documenting my progress in a draft PR (Which I didn't even know was a think until I started working on this repo) I found another Issue https://github.com/mozilla/OpenWPM/issues/665 that was asking the code to be updated and then I found the release of geckodriver that added the functionality https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases/tag/v0.24.0
So I complied all my research into a comment and waited... and waited... and waited until the day that I had to submit my first pull request. Still no reply... But I learnt something that my professor talked about frequently to the class, pull requests take a long time. He has a pull request that has taken over 2 years and still isn't merged. The work that I do is not always going to be taken right away and I may have to create many iterations of the pull request and wait for a response and get back to it after.
And as of October 12th it turns out that the code base doesn't even have the functionality since they are on a previous version of selenium https://github.com/mozilla/OpenWPM/issues/665#issuecomment-706963399
So all I did was just add a comment in the code saying that in geckodriver 0.26 they have added a functionality to create full screenshots but the code that we are using currently does not use it. It can be summed up in one sentence, but the steps that I took and the research that needed to be done took me a while and I'm happy that my first PR was a little bit of a failure since I got to learn.
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