What I'd really like is every project documentation has a short "development loop" section. How do the maintainers actually set it up in some kind of development mode, make a change, see the results and be able to iterate on that (and diff/stage the change they made)?
Sometimes, this can be extremely non-obvious and involve a lot of fiddling about, virtual environments, copying files, setting paths or ports etc. Especially when the language or development tooling is unfamiliar. But it's almost insultingly obvious to someone who has developed their workflow for years on the project.
A good example of how not to do it is Sigrok, which has a pile of separate libraries, and instructions on building and installing but not much about whether that's the most effective way to build and debug. Especially as the library you, a prospective hacker, probably want to develop with is a lower-level one to add device support. Eventually you can piece together something, but it often feels like you're not quite doing it "as expected" (or sometimes it's just that fiddly).
A good example is Tridactyl, which has a "build and install it" section, but also has a dedicated "development loop" section that tells you to use "yarn run (re)build && yarn run run"
Sometimes, this can be extremely non-obvious and involve a lot of fiddling about, virtual environments, copying files, setting paths or ports etc. Especially when the language or development tooling is unfamiliar. But it's almost insultingly obvious to someone who has developed their workflow for years on the project.
A good example of how not to do it is Sigrok, which has a pile of separate libraries, and instructions on building and installing but not much about whether that's the most effective way to build and debug. Especially as the library you, a prospective hacker, probably want to develop with is a lower-level one to add device support. Eventually you can piece together something, but it often feels like you're not quite doing it "as expected" (or sometimes it's just that fiddly).
A good example is Tridactyl, which has a "build and install it" section, but also has a dedicated "development loop" section that tells you to use "yarn run (re)build && yarn run run"