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

cprimozic.net

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

#71

Post by kccqzy »

bgirard wrote: post #44
kgeist wrote: post #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.

> 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 ;)

Why build it if you are just reading? I find https://source.chromium.org/chromium wonderful. With things like go-to-definition and find-all-overridden-functions working wonderfully well.

I find this to be ideal when working with a large codebase. I don't even need an editor with fancy intelligence features and LSP integration; a bare bones vim or emacs paired with a website with all the intelligence already there.

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

#73

Post by Suppafly »

quirino wrote: post #63
bkor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every once in a while, the browser detects I'm typing "±±±±±±+..." Interesting bug! Not exactly following on what triggers the bug. Do you have a ± key on your keyboard (some international one)? Or does it occur after e.g. pressing "+", then "-"? Do you use compose keys? Does it do this randomly?

I don't have a ± key. I'm using swaywm which seems to have no compose key set by default, I've tried all the common ones and they don't act as such. I haven't been able to detect any pattern to what triggers this, at all. It is always "±".

You could probably set up some keylogging to see if anything special is happening before it, it'd also let you know for sure if it's a keyboard issue or not.

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

#75

Post by mdaniel »

mrweasel wrote: post #15

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…

> I doubt that Firefox is better

For a long time I would build Firefox from source every morning, and I don't have the build logs anymore but I would guess it was in the range of 60 to 75 minutes. Comparing building anything on a VIA C3 is not serious, nor is using some 5400rpm disk for the same task

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

#76

Post by kccqzy »

mrweasel wrote: post #15

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…

Open source doesn't imply "everyone can contribute" at all. The most famous example is perhaps SQLite, which is fully open source (even in the public domain) but contributions are not welcome.

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

#77

Post by sebstefan »

>I started my debugging by finding where the network request for the worklet script was initiated and tracing it down as far as necessary until the request was actually made - or retrieved from the cache. The call tree looked something like this:

It completely escapes me how you can find that in such a codebase.

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

#78

Post by aardshark »

modeless wrote: post #65

This is great! You should consider fixing the Chromium bugs you run into! Chrome releases relatively quickly, so in 4-6 weeks you can have a bug fixed forever for all of your users on Chrome. I used to work on Chrome and WebKit and I still have committer status. I've often wondered if there are people out there who would be willing to pay a contributor to get their bug fixed, but don't know who to contact. Feel free…

There is an annoying bug in Chrome DevTools that people who want to impede debugging of their JS files exploit. I think it's probably related to making the regex engine use excess memory and crashing the tab.

Anyway, just mentioning it to see if someone here knows if it's a well known and difficult to fix bug, or if it's just a bit obscure to have had any fixes for.

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

#79

Post by macqm »

>Because of this huge codebase size, I wasn't able to get VS Code's C++ extension to work very well with the project. Features like go-to definition (which I usually rely on heavily when navigating codebases) and find references didn't work well or at all, and one of my CPU cores would stay stuck at 100% permanently while the project was open.

Chromium Code Search [1] tool is very helpful with that and I believe there are some extensions that integrate with it.

1: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src

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

#80

Post by evmar »

This post is really great! My biggest piece of advice to someone attempting to do the same is to browse the code via the online code browser, which has working cross referencing. (The codebase is so large it is not the sort of index you can reliably build locally...)

https://cs.chromium.org is the easy URL to remember ("cs" for "code search")

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