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I\'ve started working on my first open source project on Codeplex and came acros

ID: 659615 • Letter: I

Question

I've started working on my first open source project on Codeplex and came across some terrible code. (I did learn that C# still has the "goto" statement) I started adding features that the "owner" wanted and after exploring the code base and seeing what a mess it was (e.g using "goto") I wanted to clean it up a bit. But I am a bit concerned and that is why I'm turning to you all: is it proper etiquette for me to "fix" the "bad code" or should I let it be and work on new features? Like I said before, I'm new to the whole OSS scene and working on a team in general so I would like to not mess it up.

Explanation / Answer

It's ok to do this, if you're modest about it and it doesn't break anything. You can't go around reformatting code and introducing bugs. Does it have good unit tests? If not, I'd start contributing by adding unit tests, and then go fix the structure later.

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