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Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

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Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#31

Have you got paid for this? The reason I am asking is that I see volunteering time for extremely wealthy big corporations as foolish. At very least developers should get together and lobby that if big corporations use open source software, they should be paying royalties to contributors. That said, if you look at volunteering time, it is much better to do it for charities that often struggle getting competent IT peop…

This is fair, and is my general philosophy. But if you're running into the bug first hand and its costing you otherwise, it may be the most pragmatic thing to just fix the bug yourself and contribute it back.

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#32

Have you got paid for this? The reason I am asking is that I see volunteering time for extremely wealthy big corporations as foolish. At very least developers should get together and lobby that if big corporations use open source software, they should be paying royalties to contributors. That said, if you look at volunteering time, it is much better to do it for charities that often struggle getting competent IT peop…

Consider this, the thing they fixed is something they depend on for their daily programming needs relatively often. By fixing it themselves instead of waiting for who knows how long, they are saving a lot of future time and frustration. They don't to work around the issue anymore and can simply focus on what they want.

Which is also worth something.

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#33

Not that I really see away around it, given the size and feature set of Chrome, but those build requirements are just crazy. It kinda throws the open source and "everyone can contribute" model out the window, if you can't afford a pretty insane workstation then you're going to have a bad time. I doubt that Firefox is better, I seem to remember that building Firefox and the VIA C3 processor years back as around half a…

At which point was Chromium even attempting a "everyone can contribute" model of opensource? Like most corporate OSS projects, community contributions aren't something they rely on.

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#34
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Certainly with Mozilla the interactions I have had on Bugzilla with various people there as well as in other places simply made me decide to work around the issues. Can you elaborate on your experience?

Sure. I should point out though that I also had many positive individual experiences with people from Mozilla. Interesting conversations and insights in various things. It is just that overall I had a few too many interactions, which would make hesitate trying to invest a lot of time in things like PRs. What it mostly comes down to is that communication several times seemingly seemed a one way street. Where I provide…

Yeah, pretty much my experience with any large open source project - I find that if its a solo activity or a small focused group my bugs might get any attention, but after there's more than 10 or so contributors I politely move on by.

Too many times submitting a feature request or reproducible bug report in github that's "ranked by thumbs up" and then having that closed as wont fix.

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#35

Congratulations! And thank you for the great write-up. I work with the Chromium code base a lot, and it can indeed be daunting. I use Sublime Text, which treats the code as plain text, apart from syntax highlighting. But it's also possible with at least VS Code to get some more intelligence, such as going to the definition or declaration of a function, etc. People who have now become interested in creating their own…

From your post > you will (...) want to change the name of your browser [to] "Browser of Bliss" instead of as "Chromium". You will find that this is already hard to do. The browser name is hard-coded in many places in the millions of lines of Chromium source code. (...) Viasat are offering a (...) fork called Rebel that makes this easier I am surprised that kind of change has not been upstreamed, or is Google activel…

It’s just the kind of thing that happens in a huge, production codebase.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Google, but some strings in multiple places isn’t a good reason to be skeptical of the Chromium maintainers.

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#36

Not that I really see away around it, given the size and feature set of Chrome, but those build requirements are just crazy. It kinda throws the open source and "everyone can contribute" model out the window, if you can't afford a pretty insane workstation then you're going to have a bad time. I doubt that Firefox is better, I seem to remember that building Firefox and the VIA C3 processor years back as around half a…

Depends on how much you really have hyped yourself on the task :-P.

Back in early 2000s a friend of mine was mentioning on IRC how middle clicking on a scrollbar in Mozilla under X11 didn't jump to the clicked point like in other X11 GUI programs. I was full into the Mozilla hype back then (the project was basically at its apex of coolness :-P) and wanted to get people into it, so i thought "this is opensource, right? I can do it myself and convince people how great Mozilla is".

Problem being, i had a Pentium MMX @ 200MHz with 128MB of RAM. It took at least six hours to do a build (most likely more, i felt asleep at some point during the night, then woke up ~5-6h later, was still compiling and i left to go out with a friend and was done when i came back some time later). Even if i didn't make a change and tried to recompile it took half an hour.

Fortunately i had already done some GUI programs by that point (and even tried to make my own GUI systems and toolkits) so i had a rough idea where to look and it didn't took too long to figure out the CPP file where scrollbar behavior was implemented (though it did take some extra hours).

I did submit it and remember being impressed by the process of having my patch to be "reviewed" and then "super reviewed", thinking that it now makes sense how Mozilla is of high quality (remember, i was a teenager big into the hype, everything was filtered through the most positive lens). FWIW i was asked to make a couple of minor changes but it was merged in.

I don't think i'd have as much patience these days, the last time i tried to build some relatively complex piece of software so i can contribute to it was with Krita, but that took only about an hour (including getting everything needed to build) - and it didn't work at the end (it built but crashed at startup) so i decided to try some other time as i had lost interest by that point to debug why it didn't work :-P.

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#37
post #17

On a similar note, i always wanted to contribute to Firefox, but every time i looked at how to compile it i noped the fuck out of it. It's probably is doable on linux but it's sounds like a nightmare on windows.

You can develop Firefox with Nix.

https://github.com/mozilla/nixpkgs-mozilla?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Then you can use Nix from windows, but im unsure of performance or friction as I've totally abandoned windows personally.

Here are some resources:

https://nathan.gs/2023/12/14/nixos-on-windows/

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_Installation_Guide#Windows_Subsy...

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#38

Congratulations! And thank you for the great write-up. I work with the Chromium code base a lot, and it can indeed be daunting. I use Sublime Text, which treats the code as plain text, apart from syntax highlighting. But it's also possible with at least VS Code to get some more intelligence, such as going to the definition or declaration of a function, etc. People who have now become interested in creating their own…

>So how much does it cost to maintain a Chromium fork? >It obviously depends on the number of customizations your browser has, and on how quickly you want to incorporate security fixes from upstream. Chromium is one of the world's most complex pieces of software, and you need very capable engineers and powerful hardware to match this. It is going to be expensive. And not just once, but also on an ongoing basis.

This confirms my thoughts after I tried messing with chromium's and brave's code bases.

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#39

Congratulations! And thank you for the great write-up. I work with the Chromium code base a lot, and it can indeed be daunting. I use Sublime Text, which treats the code as plain text, apart from syntax highlighting. But it's also possible with at least VS Code to get some more intelligence, such as going to the definition or declaration of a function, etc. People who have now become interested in creating their own…

From your post > you will (...) want to change the name of your browser [to] "Browser of Bliss" instead of as "Chromium". You will find that this is already hard to do. The browser name is hard-coded in many places in the millions of lines of Chromium source code. (...) Viasat are offering a (...) fork called Rebel that makes this easier I am surprised that kind of change has not been upstreamed, or is Google activel…

> is Google actively working against forks

They could not accept those changes without being actively against forks. It would just mean they aren't actively supporting forks, which is a different thing.

Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor

#40
Chromium's codebase isn't so bad for a first timer. Years ago our product had a bug on Windows where if you paste an image from the clipboard, the image had garbage in it (something to do with alpha channels). I realized Chrome has no such bug so they probably had a workaround. It took me like 30 minutes of lurking around in the codebase for the first time to find their workaround and apply it to our code.
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