Mozilla Bug Week

Gerv writes: "Do you run Mozilla? Is there something about Mozilla that bugs you? Do you have an itch you want to scratch? From Saturday October 27th to Sunday November 4th, mozilla.org will be running a "Bug Week". Experienced Mozilla hackers will be available to help anyone who wants to get involved with the Mozilla code. Engineers from companies using Mozilla or Mozilla technologies, interested onlookers, and those who are involved with the project, but have never hacked on the code, are all welcome to come along and get their feet wet."

Gerv continues:

"You'll be shown round our world-class web-based tools (Bugzilla, Bonsai, Tinderbox, LXR), and led through all the steps between discovering a problem and having your patch checked in to the Mozilla source tree. After checkin, those fixes and features will be appreciated by an audience of millions in Mozilla derivative products.

Not Just For Hardcore Hackers

"Mozilla's user interface is written in web technologies - defined in XUL (XML-based User-interface Language), animated with JavaScript and styled with Cascading Style Sheets. This means it can be understood, and hacked on, by anyone who understands HTML/XML, JS and Style Sheets. mozilla.org has recently developed technology to allow fixes to be made to Mozilla's UI without the need to compile Mozilla - all you need is a self-installing nightly build. This widens the field of potential contributors to everyone who's ever made a decent web page.

"So, if you have thought about getting involved in a free software project, but it all seemed to complicated or difficult, here's your chance.

"On the other hand, if you want to check the entire source tree out from CVS, compile the embedding test harness, and go into deep hack mode on Mozilla's C++ core, we'll help you do that too.

"Bug Week will be happening on IRC. Mozilla's nightly builds even include a chat client, ChatZilla, to make it even easier to participate. Look for people whose nicks begin with "BW_". We hope to have people there most of the time, although the help may be concentrated when the US West Coast or Europe is awake."

Comments

Re:Major Roadblock to using Mozilla

[SCHecklerX]

Try this

Individual apps don't NEED a friggin' spell checker. They should hook into the stuff already on your system. That said, the solution in the link above allows you to simply hilight the stuff you want to check and checks it (if your windowmanager is smart enough to give you the ability to see what is in your X selection)

Re:Bugzilla

[Tsk]

Rather than just ranting and raving about your pet peeve, you should rant, rave AND enter it into Bugzilla [mozilla.org] (after ascertaining that it isn't already in there).

That's exactly (i think) why mozilla.org is hosting such event. If you read the weekly mozilla status, you'll often read that what mozilla.org's dev tend to do most is triaging their bugs in bugzilla, once bug are targeted and assigned they can start working on finding an norrowing the bugs and coding the fixes. For most of these steps you'll find information on mozilla.org's web site. You'll evne be able to run bugathon, help qa etc ....
Some people just help eliminate bug duplicates but that's not enough, they still need the work force to creat patches and fixes. I've downloaded the source code once or twice, I've tried hard with the limited time I can devote to such project (I have a work, and ssocial life), I was disapointed, becaause I could not get fast enough in the internals of the code.

Such events can help people like myself without much time to dig into it and bust bugs out of the product. OTOH Universtity started and now most CS clases are starting many students will have some time to work on the project in the forthcomin year, with a little help in the bigenning this will (I'm pretty sure) widen the number of mozilla developers that are not from the AOL/Netscape Alliance. Also many school project can with such be launched, that will focuse maybe on a module of mozilla, but such project are really good for the quality of the code, I hope some cs teachers will see the oportunity to base some of the projects they'll lead focused around the mozilla project.

Re:BUG: The red dinosaur

[Professor J Frink]

Ya a couple crusty eurotrash "coderz" contributed some bloat to the project, but let's be realistic, 90% of the developers are the crappy low skill AOL employees that got the unfortunate task of trying to make something useable out of the crusty old netscape code.

Mozilla is not based on the ''crusty old netscape code''. They tried that. They didn't get very far. Mozilla is, afaik, a pretty much complete rewrite from scratch. One of many legitimate reasons it's taken so long to get to the very useable state it is in now.

Mozilla is a very competent and capable browser. About the best available for non-Windows users and plenty of those like it too. It costs you nothing. It's totally open for anyone to do what they want with it. Why do so many people have a problem with this? If you don't like it, don't use it.

It's taken a long time coming, sure, but so was Win2K. At least you've been able to use Mozilla all the time it's been developed. I jumped on board around 0.9 after trying out the earlier versions and not being overly impressed. It's now on all my machines and my users are very happy with it.