[GNC-dev] Simple Start to Contributing

[Paul Kroitor]

Hi, my apologies for asking such basic questions, but I'm new to GnuCash
contributions - although not to coding - and want to try a simple (useful)
change to get my feet wet. So I've "fixed" the cash-flow.scm module (the
Cash Flow report) locally to adjust a minor annoyance (I added a "Show
Accounts as Hyperlinks" checkbox so it can match the other two standard
financial statements). It works the way it should now, but needs testing
against a broader set of inputs, and the localizations must get queued.

 

Some questions arise:

1.	Do I have to post anywhere / get agreement before embarking on such
a contribution (I have 30+ years of experience managing programmers and do
know I must keep the changes homogenous in style and approach to the
existing codebase)? 
2.	Must I checkout and build the entire project if I am only going to
be working in Guile/Scheme for the moment, or is there a simple way to do a
subset?
3.	Do a make a "feature branch" for this very localized change? It's
about 10 lines in a single file.
4.	I have about 10 sets of production books here, but I use no business
or shareholding features. The changes shouldn't interact with these, but
they should be checked anyway. Are there test .gnucash databases with "one
of everything" than can be used to test against (I do use multiple
currencies, and have tested that)?
5.	I understand that the localizations will happen semi-automatically
by a different team, but is there a way to use a common instance of the base
(English) text constant so they don't have to re-translate strings that are
already there (e.g. the "Show Accounts as Hyperlinks" string is already in a
half-dozen other scheme files, and thus will have already been translated
into many languages)?  
6.	How / who do I tell that it's new and should be tested before
release?

 

Thanks for all help as always,

Paul