...but can I patch the look and feel of the user interface, or are we not permitted to patch superficial things that affect "branding" and user experience?
I liked Firefox 28, not Firefox 29 and up.
I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too
#12...but can I patch the look and feel of the user interface, or are we not permitted to patch superficial things that affect "branding" and user experience? I liked Firefox 28, not Firefox 29 and up.
Everything is discussed via meetings and mailing lists. I guess you can not make significant changes to the UI, but you can contribute by writing an extension.
Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too
#13I 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.
I wrote a patch for Firefox too. While the experience was different, I applied the same method and it worked quite well. As a comment says it: the mentoring part is important, probably even more than the project itself. I saw that when trying to contribute to other large projects.
Contributing to Servo has its downsides too: things move quickly and can break, and many things are really unstable and unfinished.
Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too
#14I'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…
In addition, come on #introduction and ask questions. People are ready to help there when they see a question.
#developers will be another usual place to ask for help, but for beginner questions come to #introduction
But on the weekend, be patient, the chance of getting an answer is pretty low but some people do volunteer on the weekend.
Lastly, check out http://codefirefox.com/ to get started.
The best way to get started is to fix something you spot as bug.
Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too
#15I did it! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548763
Unfortunately it took quite a long time, the Mozilla process is quite confusing to a newcomer, even one with a lot of open source project experience. I definitely second the recommendation of finding a mentor.
Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too
#16I 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.
Servo is fun because there's a lot of low-hanging fruit (just pick an unimplemented CSS property or DOM call and implement it!), and a lot of room for experimentation (want to play with an experimental line breaking algorithm? Go nuts!)
Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too
#17...but can I patch the look and feel of the user interface, or are we not permitted to patch superficial things that affect "branding" and user experience? I liked Firefox 28, not Firefox 29 and up.
You can create patches that change the interface and/or propose UI changes. They will go through an additional ui-review though. Sometimes the result will be that writing an add-on would be a better fit for a feature or UI change.
Also, if your proposal is around reverting something to a pre-29 state, it has probably already been discussed a lot.
Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too
#18...but can I patch the look and feel of the user interface, or are we not permitted to patch superficial things that affect "branding" and user experience? I liked Firefox 28, not Firefox 29 and up.
Given that people have written add-ons to do just that, there's no need to even make patches for it.
Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too
#19What's kind of skills for programming with Mozilla?
C++, Javascript, Python... or Rust ! :)
Or even C, which some parts are written in, although it doesn't look like they're particularly friendly to lots of people changing them (IIRC some of the parsing and lexing code is in C, correct me if I'm wrong).
Re: I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too
#20In your post you mentionned that a goo way to start working with open-source project it to look for smaller scale projects to contribute on github. If been working hard to make it easier for people to find interesting/smaller projects on github by creating the /r/coolgithubprojects and the http://coolgithubprojects.com/ website lately. It's not perfect but anyone who's looking to contribute and find interesting will (I hope) find these tool useful. They're not perfect yet but we'are working hard to making open source project sharing as easy as possible!.
My 2 cents.