I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

#1

Post by martius » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 12:28 PM UTC

I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too
marti.us

Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

#2

Post by gluxon » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 1:32 PM UTC

I've done this a few times for bugs that have personally annoyed me. Gotta say, it's easy to get started and the reviewers are amazing.

Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

#3

Post by paulrouget » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 1:45 PM UTC

I've been working with new contributors for some years now. Here are some advices:

- find a mentor. It will helps a lot (use http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/); - for the first bugs, writing code is not usually the hard part. Understanding bugzilla and writing tests are; - ask for a commit access level 1 early to have access to the try servers (to run the tests); - finish what you start. Bug is fixed when it lands, not when a patch is attached; - mozilla hackers are nice people, ask questions on IRC. There's no stupid questions (we all started from zero too);

Everything will get much easier after the first bug fix. And motivation grows a lot once you have finally landed some code :)

Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

#4

Post by Osmose » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 2:15 PM UTC

paulrouget wrote: post #3

I've been working with new contributors for some years now. Here are some advices: - find a mentor. It will helps a lot (use http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/); - for the first bugs, writing code is not usually the hard part. Understanding bugzilla and writing tests are; - ask for a commit access level 1 early to have access to the try servers (to run the tests); - finish what you start. Bug is fixed when it land…

The mentor part is _huge_. Navigating the Mozilla world (Is that info in a wiki? Where are the docs for this? How do you know who to ask questions to?) is a learned skill, and at the beginning it's a big deal to have someone who, even if they don't know the answers to your questions, will know how to find the answers.

Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

#5

Post by DomingesZ » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 2:16 PM UTC

What's kind of skills for programming with Mozilla?

Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

#6

Post by jvehent » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 2:19 PM UTC

DomingesZ wrote: post #5

What's kind of skills for programming with Mozilla?

C++, Javascript, Python... or Rust ! :)

Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

#7

Post by padenot » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 2:19 PM UTC

DomingesZ wrote: post #5

What's kind of skills for programming with Mozilla?

Basically, anything. Have a look at http://www.whatcanidoformozilla.org to have a glimpse on what you can do for the project.

Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

#8

Post by barkingllama » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 2:24 PM UTC

Too bad we can't patch IE.

Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

#9

Post by williadc » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 2:32 PM UTC

jvehent wrote: post #6

DomingesZ wrote: post #5

What's kind of skills for programming with Mozilla?

C++, Javascript, Python... or Rust ! :)

The Firefox interface is written in an XML-like language, so you can fix bugs there if you know HTML+CSS.

Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

#10

Post by zokier » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 3:17 PM UTC

I wonder how much of his positive experience is due the fact that he decided to contribute to Servo instead of one of the "main" Mozilla projects (Gecko, SpiderMonkey, Firefox etc). Less hairy codebase, smaller community, github-based, and probably lot more suitable low-hanging fruits.