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Have you ever encountered a bug in the code of a program and couldn't fix it? Maybe you were reading the code from your internet browser, or maybe you didn't have Subversion or Mercurial on hand at the time to make the changes. Okay, the team of Google Project Hosting has announced a new functionality available to all intrepid developers: the possibility to edit the source code of the programs hosted there (in code.google.com) directly from the internet browser, using the powerful editor based on CodeMirror. You only need to click on the "Edit file" button to access this functionality. |
As you begin to edit the file, it is possible to see the changes compared to the original (diff) and, in this way, you will never lose the dimension of the changes you are making. But what if I don't have enough commit privileges to apply changes directly? No problem. Instead of applying the changes directly, you can save the changes as a patch so that the program developers will evaluate it and decide on its future incorporation.
By lowering the requirements for any mortal to help improve free software programs, Google is giving a BIG hand so that they can be polished, incorporate new functionalities, be more stable, etc. In a word, this is great news for free software development.
Source: Official Google Open Source blog