> I'll unashamedly admit that I made liberal use of printf debugging while trying to make my way through these code paths
Nothing to be ashamed of, imo; printf debugging works incredibly well!
Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor
41–50 of 170 posts
Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor
#42Have 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.
But that will make these companies lazy.
Chromium is open source, in my opinion, because Google can brag about open source, it has all the right buzzwords. But also gives them free R&D and labour.
I think given the size and wealth of Google, this is entirely inappropriate and people shouldn't be contributing to it, because it will only encourage this parasitic and exploitative behaviour.
Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor
#43Not 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…
> I doubt that Firefox is better Firefox builds are seemingly more modular. I was hacking on the Firefox devtools a while back, which from source involved downloading a pre-build main brower binary and building just devtools from your source. This made it significantly faster due to not having to build the rest of Firefox from source. Of course, this will all depend on which part of the source code you're changing.
Firefox isn’t very modular. There’s just a C++ part and a JS part and they can be built independently. My understanding is that new developers are encouraged to focus on the JS. The devtools team is entirely JS, with some fancy modern affordances (TypeScript type definitions!) that teams working on the older parts of the JS codebase don’t have.
Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor
#44Chromium'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.
> Chromium's codebase isn't so bad for a first timer.
Agreed
> It took me like 30 minutes
I can tell you didn't need to build it ;)
Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But that will make these companies lazy. Chromium is open source, in my opinion, because Google can brag about open source, it has all the right buzzwords. But also gives them free R&D and labour. I think given the size and wealth of Google, this is entirely inappropriate and people shouldn't be contributing to it, because it will only encourage this parasitic and exploitative behaviour.
There is a entire ecosystem because of Chromium.
I'd argue it's one of the least "parasitic" corporate OSS project.
Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor
#46Have 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…
One of my Google interviewers leaned back in his Eames lounge chair and stated that he got his start there by contributing optimizations to Chromium. I think it worked out well for him.
Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I know it's naturally happening in a large codebase, I'm asking why they specifically maintain a fork just for that instead of trying to push what are probably easy (but tedious) upstream fixes.
Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor
#48Not 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…
My solution for a few "bugs considered features" in huge open-source software like Firefox was to just patch the binary. Much easier than figuring out how to build it, and with only the change I wanted.
Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But that will make these companies lazy. Chromium is open source, in my opinion, because Google can brag about open source, it has all the right buzzwords. But also gives them free R&D and labour. I think given the size and wealth of Google, this is entirely inappropriate and people shouldn't be contributing to it, because it will only encourage this parasitic and exploitative behaviour.
The majority of work on Chromium is done by engineers on Google's payroll.
There certainly are OSS projects out there where the majority of work is done by volunteers and where companies profit from their labor. This isn't really one of them, at least not in the way you are describing it.
Applying one "truth" to the entire world generally means that you're simplifying things to such a degree that they become meaningless or even ridiculous parodies of themselves.
I feel like that this might be what you are doing here.
Re: Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor
#50> but a clean build still takes something like 45 minutes to finish I had a similar experience when building Firefox from source >. though I recall I had more trouble when pulling the codes as I was naive and pulled all the history
In 2013 I also worked as first time contributor on a bug that affected the linux version of Firefox.
Firefox took 2 hours to compile in my pentium dual-core Intel laptop, it was in August so warm inside the house, the 2 hours compiling at closer 100% cpu made the laptop halt due to excessive temperature before finishing. I also recall the build failed because of out-of-memory error (ram exhausted) I had 2GB and had to expand to 4 GB or something like that.
After overcoming the struggles I was finally happy as the fix was committed.