My first contribution to an open source project

January 05, 2009

Two weeks ago, while writing some unit tests for one of my projects I wanted to use an XML configuration file in order to bootstrap the PHPUnit testing framework. As you may know, in PHPUnit you may organize your unit tests in test suites, and also give them names. So, for better organizing my tests, I wanted five directories holding five different test suites which I thought could be easily configured inside the phpunit.xml file. Well, apparently there was support for only one test suite and a ticket opened for such an addition to the framework. As a result I hacked a little bit the source code and came up with a simple patch (really, there is nothing fancy about it) so that now the config file accepts multiple test suites.

Thanks to Sebastian Bergmann the patch got accepted and it will be available with PHPUnit 3.4

For many (web) developers out there this might be something really, really trivial and they're right, but this is my first contribution to an open source project and I'm happy about it. Some time ago, reading blog post of Andrei Maxim (a fellow web developer) I got inspired and said to myself that I should too contribute some code to an open source project (he wanted a commit though, not a patch). Well, this was my first step. More to come... I hope.