Hacktoberfest 2019
Yesterday I completed my pull requests for Hacktoberfest this year. This is my third year participating.
Each time it has been a surprisingly rewarding experience. I've been exposed to new projects and code that I wouldn't have otherwise.
In a prior year I was invited to be part of the team of maintainers for a well known open source project, and I've continued to contribute to it. That isn't something I intended or expected, but I'm proud of it, and I think it shows that the event is valuable. Nothing that exciting happened this year though!
While essentially any pull request counts, I approach it as a challenge to contribute to a project used by others. This makes it harder but I get more out of it.
Part of the difficulty is finding issues to work on or useful changes to make. I scour lists of issues looking for ones that both sound interesting and sound like something I could take on.
This year all my pull requests were against Irssi and its website. I worked on a discordgo issue but didn't get it to a stage I was happy submitting, though I posted a comment that might be useful in resolving it.
PR #1 Irssi: Removing and deprecating functions
This is a small and not very interesting PR. I actually was working on this before October but didn't get around to submitting it. It came out of me reading through Irssi code looking for issues, something I've been doing off and on.
PR #2 Irssi: Use correct TLS settings when reconnecting
This PR fixes an issue where Irssi would sometimes use the wrong TLS settings when reconnecting to a network. In Irssi, a network can contain multiple servers. The problem is that when reconnecting it bases the new connection on the connection to the prior server, including copying its TLS settings. I changed how it did that.
PR #3 Irssi: Remove the resolve_reverse_lookup setting
This PR removes a setting to fix a reported issue. The setting was introduced in 2002 and doesn't make a lot of sense. It sets the server address to the server IP's reverse DNS when connecting, overriding the name you provided. In addition to probably ending up with a hostname that is opaque and unrecognisable, this breaks TLS verification since the verification checks the certificate against this hostname.
PR #4 Irssi's website: Remove the resolve_reverse_lookup docs
This PR is a counterpart to the prior one. I fixed a couple other small issues while doing it. There's not much to say about it other than I hadn't touched the website before so it took a little figuring out.