31–38 of 38 posts
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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).
I had a similar experience with emscripten (yeah I know, Mozilla too) initially. So I start working on a project with the following steps:
- Download code - Setup environment - Run test suite (if exists) - Play with simple bits of code by hard coding changes and building it to see it's effect. - ... sleep? - Attempt baby bug first
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…
I say this as a person who wasted two years working on a Firefox patch, which, in hindsight, would have landed in a month or two if I'd had a mentor. (Not that I'm bitter.) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347174
I 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.
I don't think I would have been able to get my two patches into Mozilla if it wasn't for the mentored bugs program. It's incredibly useful and I wish more projects would implement it. ahem openstack cough .
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…
It would be helpful if the Mozilla Bugzilla had some way of opting in to identifying that you have a mentor, so that it would be easy for reviewers to see, "hey, this person's working pretty hard on this bug, but he hasn't declared a mentor. We should suggest that he find a mentor." I say this as a person who wasted two years working on a Firefox patch, which, in hindsight, would have landed in a month or two if I'd…
The bug that you worked on was a bit of an outlier in the sense that:
* It modified relatively complex parts of the code. * There was initially no (HTML) spec for the feature. * There was initially insufficient information to know what the spec for the feature ought to say.
So I think a mentor might well have told you "this is not a good first bug". Of course that make it all the more impressive that you pushed through the difficulties and got the patch landed and the spec fixed along the way. Thank you for that! The main delays seem to have been waiting for review, which a mentor may or may not have been able to help with depending on whether there were other less-busy qualified reviewers, and waiting for the patch to land, which these days we have a better process for and so which wouldn't happen again.
I hope I'll have the chance to contribute again to this great open source browser.
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It would be helpful if the Mozilla Bugzilla had some way of opting in to identifying that you have a mentor, so that it would be easy for reviewers to see, "hey, this person's working pretty hard on this bug, but he hasn't declared a mentor. We should suggest that he find a mentor." I say this as a person who wasted two years working on a Firefox patch, which, in hindsight, would have landed in a month or two if I'd…
As of a few weeks ago, bugzilla has a "mentor" field which is being used to identify bugs that are good for new contributors to work on and the correct person to mentor them. It would certainly make sense for someone looking to work on a bug with no suggested mentor to ask for one. If you have any suggestions for how to make this work well in the UI, it would be good to hear; expecting people to notice "this bug does…
But that's kind of my point. "Mentored bugs" is an interesting approach, but normally people have mentors, not bugs, and I think that having a "mentor/mentee" field on user profiles may be the right approach for Mozilla; the field would show up on comments/patches I post.
That way, the reviewer could have seen on my profile that I'm new to fixing Mozilla bugs and unmentored, and in his first review, he could have suggested, "I think you should fix these things, and BTW, I think you should find a mentor to shepherd you through this process."