Do you really go hack on random large codebases at a moment's notice when something about them irks you? If so, please know that nobody else on the planet can do this without spending weeks of time (conservatively).
Yes. At least when the codebase is in a paradigm that I'm familiar with. Note: language is not important in exploring a codebase. I probably couldn't do this with, say, GHC. But, I bet I could with Clang or a js library, if I wanted.
While I might not know my way around the codebase, I can certainly use grep to find where I need to go, or just ask someone on irc. In a few hours, I can at least find where I need to be, and be hacking.
The end result might not be good enough to send in as a patch, but it'll certainly fulfill my needs.
Sure, I have some skills that others don't. But, I'm not the only one who can do this, either.
It's interesting to think that this might be a skill that we free software developers have to degrees that other developers don't. I generally think of this as "hacking".
The biggest thing to learn isnt in the patches. It's in the process -- don't be afraid to break things, and dont let "I don't know everything about this" stop you from learning one small corner of it.
Yeah I've tried that many times (I have some experience with vim, gcc, windowmaker, but mozilla was larger than them all, last time I checked) and with some success. It's totally possible. My point is merely that it's labor-intensive. There's a cost to swapping in all that state, and to swapping it out and back in again everytime you find a bug with your hacks.
(Tangent) Lately I find I'm much more likely to hack on codebases with lots of tests. Having a single command tell me when I've broken things makes me less afraid of having to deal with subtle breakage, where my changes break some feature I just happen to not use for the next n weeks/months.
Yes. At least when the codebase is in a paradigm that I'm familiar with. Note: language is not important in exploring a codebase. I probably couldn't do this with, say, GHC. But, I bet I could with Clang or a js library, if I wanted.
While I might not know my way around the codebase, I can certainly use grep to find where I need to go, or just ask someone on irc. In a few hours, I can at least find where I need to be, and be hacking.
The end result might not be good enough to send in as a patch, but it'll certainly fulfill my needs.
Sure, I have some skills that others don't. But, I'm not the only one who can do this, either.