• Share this article:

Great Fix Winners, Round Two

Sunday, April 5, 2015 - 22:06 by Wayne Beaton

Sorry, I’m a little bit late with this announcement. We have three more winners in the Great Fixes for Mars Skills Competition. In no particular order:

Snjezana Peco contributed a couple of Great Fixes, but I’ll focus on the patch provided for
Bug 446075: Garbled bold text when used with icons. This patch fixes an annoying little problem that those of us using GTK 3 on Linux have had to put up with. I’ve categorized this as a “stability” bug; it’s clear that Snjezana has detailed knowledge of both SWT and GTK; and there’s no denying the impact.

Next up is Tomasz Zarna who has contributed seven Great Fixes, most of which I’ve categorized as improving stability (including one for a bug report that was filed almost twelve years ago). One example, the more recently created Bug 439041, which fixes a memory leak in progress animations. The code included in this patch itself is only a few lines, but the patch includes new test code.

Our third winner is Dirk Fauth has also contributed seven Great Fixes (there’s actually two other bugs that would qualify that I might have tagged with greatfix myself). Dirk’s fixes are all relatively small fixes that have obviously been provided by an expert. Some of the fixes improve stability in the IDE and RCP applications (Bugs 463043 and 457939). The others provide a variety of improvements that collectively improve the user and developer experiences. Dirk has substantially improved existing and added new test code that accompanies the code fixes.

Congratulations to the winners. Everybody else who has contributed a great fix is still in the competition for our third and final round. All participants will get an Eclipse shirt.

I’m encouraged that we’re starting to see at least some great fixes candidates for projects other than the Eclipse Platform. Keep these coming; fixes for all projects doing things related to improving the Java development experience qualify: Web Tools, EGit, Maven Integration, Buildship, …

Finally, one our first winners was unable to accept the prize, so we have an extra. I’ve decided that we’ll give this prize to the committer who has reviewed and accepted the most greatfix contributions (both Lars and Dani–who are prolific reviewers–have excluded themselves as potential winners).