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Mozilla Bug Week
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."
Rather than just ranting and raving about your pet peeve, you should rant, rave AND enter it into Bugzilla (after ascertaining that it isn't already in there).
Subnote: Don't directly link to individual bugs in slashdot comments. It causes spam when people add ME TOOs as comments.
(Hey, mod this anonymous bugzilla pointer post up, not the various karma whores to follow.)
I made an effort to comment of XSLT functionality with multiple newsgroup posts, but got no response. These days, I may have the time to hack Mozilla.
A very good idea of theirs to have an open house.
I run it at 1600x1200, no problems whatsoever.
what exactly is your problem ?
On both Linux at home and Windows at work. Of course if you could give a slightly better description of the 'problem' you are seeing people may be able to give you some suggestions....
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
yaking about them here on Slashdot is not going to help get them fixed any faster. At least go to the right forum, or write up the bug.
it is very easy to chew the fat about a problem, and then not do anything to fix the issue. Which seems to be par for the course.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There's one major problem with Mozilla's email component, something that that will probably keep me from using Mozilla all together, specifically the lack of a spelling checker.
I really like the mail reader, it's got all the features that I've been looking for (multiple 'from' options, mixing pop and IMAP accounts for example) but the lack of a spelling checker is really a problem for me.
Why don't you put your money where your mouth is and volunteer to help them, dude, instead of criticising.
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
I want to look up and see a little picture of a fucking house and click on it and end up at my homepage.
Otherwise it is a great browser.
:wq
Where do you find these?
To be a lot more effective such announce should be spread a little bit more.
....). Some of these OS already back up the mozilla project , and donate engeeniring forces to the project thats good but for other OSes, distro etc it's not the case So i sugest this announce to be publihed on sites like :
Mozilla will be the browser for many alternative OSes (read OS/2, BeOS, Linux, Qnx, Aix
advogato
Beunited
QnxStart
I don't know any windows related sites, but adnantech should do it.
This announce should also be mailed on developing mailing lists like apple's darwin developement list
.
Anyway a lot of great doc are available here and are good sartup point. Sometimes ago some video detailling how to dig in the code where available on mozilla's web site (but I can't find them right now).
none Yet.
Mozilla is an embarrasment to open source...
The only time an Open Source project fails is when people can no longer find the source.
Mozilla itself could be abandoned tomorrow and it'd still be a success.. one merely needs to look at the Mozilla projects page to see the vast quantity of spin-off projects that Mozilla started. Not only are there the well known ones such as Gecko and Bugzilla but there are many, many others like two JavaScript interpreters (one in C++, one in Java), the Netscape Portable Runtime and XPCOM. There's even a commercial product (Komodo)!
Why I can not specify personal CSS in Mozilla GUI setup? Yes I know that it is possible in some config text file to specify JS like command. But I will need to run Google, or dig in far conner of Mozilla.org. I will probably just run Opera. Ideally it should be enabled / dissabled with some hot key. Personal CSS is a good thing. Consistent fonts, colors and even one more way to disable ADs.
Also I wish Mozilla would be more keyboard friendly which makes working on laptop much more pleasant. Even better - with configurable keys.
Isn't every week Mozilla bug week? :)
What are you complaining about? The only projects that end, typically, are failed projects. In order for stuff to continue to improve, it can't end. Are you also sick of hearing about the never-ending project that is windows (which just had its 5.1 release, to great fanfare) this week? What about the never-ending RealPlayer project? Or the Mac OS project? Or the WinAmp project? Or ...? If you don't like hearing about them, here's a suggestion:
Stop reading sites that print news about software!
Jackass.
Insightful: +1. Funny: +1. Flamebait: -1. Troll: -1. A good flame: priceless
.sig: file not found
Mozilla isn't all-american. People from various different countries work on Mozilla too... From South Africa to here in Canada. Identifying the lizard with the USA would more than likely alienate a good number of Mozilla hackers, and that would be a BAD THING.
:P
And communism isn't the only thing associated with the color red you know... What happened to raspberry jam, huh?
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
Ehr, it's running kinda slow on my 32MB P90. What should I do?
(Sorry, could not resist)
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
You're right of course. I've quit my job and enrolled in 3rd grade, where I expect I'll meet you.
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.
"Don't get mad, get a monkey!"
The fact that you can not get the Flash plugin for Mozilla when running it on Windows 98. I am very happy to see that Mozilla works better at home on my Linux Mandrake 8.1 box than at work on this silly Win98 box that I am posting from right now! ;-)
;-)
Just out of curiosity, how do you get the Netscape plugin for Flash to work for Mozilla? It appears to only need to be redirected to mozilla.exe from netscape.exe? Is that true, or do I need to lay off the crack pipe again??
in debian GNU/Linux the package is named msttcorefonts
Actually the problem is with English. Many (perhaps most?) languages are actually spelled the way they sound. Even loan works are transformed so they match the local spelling rules.
Spending valuable time memorizing thousands of bizarre English spellings might help you to impress people, but that's time that could have been spent learning something useful.
As far as I'm concerned, trying to improve my spelling in the age of spellcheckers is about as useful as trying to improve my handwriting in the age of word-processers. It's a nice hobby if you enjoy it, but it's not a life skill.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
See this /. article about the calendar. It's post-1.0 work, if you can, help us out with getting Mozilla to that milestone.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
Yes you can. Just go to Macromedia's site, do the "get flash" thing, and select the Windows plugin for Netscape browsers. The installer will automatically detect Mozilla and install the plugin. You may need to restart Mozilla afterward, but then you are set.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
The biggest problem I have with Open Source software is that there is this myth that because something is open, anyone can fix bugs and contribute updates.
Well yes they can. But the problem stems from the lead time required to get the know the project, how it works, what does what and how different functions interact with each other.
Some examples. One of the companies I used to work for (a large IT consultancy company) I worked on a telemetry project. For every person who joined that project, there was a lead time of about three months for them to get used to, understand and know how the system works.
Okay, so that was one massive project and with people working full time on it, but Mozilla and other open source projects aren't exactly small either.
Another example. I wrote a GPL perl script called AvantSlash to take the content of Slashdot and process it for handhelds (since Slashdot's own isn't very good). Unfortunately due to a bug and an overdependence on AvantGo's caching, it accidenly spammed the slashdot site and got its IP barred. (This was in the 1.x thread, v2.0 doesn't suffer this problem).
A comment by Jamie a couple of days ago mentioned why it was banned and suggested that I contribute to slashcode.
Whilst this, in theory, is a great idea, as it would seem to be common with open source coders he unfortunately forgot that there would be several months of lead time whilst I learn how the code works, what does what and why and then, once I knew the system well, actually apply a well written patch.
Don't get me wrong, I love open source and the stuff it produces and I have a lot of respect for anyone who spends their time doing such stuff.
However, I'm just pointing out that there is a common myth amongst people in massive open source projects that people can just download, install and then immediately start dipping into the code and producing patches without having to go through the whole learning process.
So, back to Mozilla. Anything which speeds up this lead time has got to be a good thing and will have the added advantage of getting more people interested in the whole project.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
This is a great chance for people to discover how mozilla is more than a browser. More importantly, it looks like the mozilla folk are responding to their critics who are calling this an open source project that is, in reality, closed to all but a select group
My only question is why isn't this info posted on mozilla.org? Wouldn't that be the logical place to put an announcement like this?
http://metamuscle.com - Better Bodies Through Hypertext
you can download a plugin to get a fullscreen view in mozilla. try multizilla.
Multizilla's the tab thing, not full screen, isn't it?
Full screen is currently being written, I think.
Gerv
How many of those spin off projects have produced usable applications? How many of the mozilla ports actually work?
I myself have used Galeon, Komodo, Bugzilla and Rhino (JavaScript in Java) without problems. Rhino has actually influenced the creation of other projects itself.
Bugzilla is extremely successful. Galeon, K-Meleon, Skipstone, Activestate Komodo, the OS/2 Web Browser, Beonex... all these are successful Mozilla derivatives or spin-offs.
All the ports build and work fine - check our Tinderbox if you want.
Gerv
Talk about it. I had never seen such a link before and was gladly surprised (I've got Moz 9.5) of its effect. BTW, my first post at /. - um, hello everybody, or something.
yeah, but in the mean time displaying a tab in fullscreen is probably close enough. There is a toolbar that comes with multizilla that allows for this. It acts just like the IE fullscreen view I would imagine (minus the tabs of course).
If you habitually misspell words in your e-mail messages, the problem is likely to lie with your education rather than the software. Inclusion of software crutches for a wetware problem only makes the latter worse.
Utter nonsense. Typographical errors are a fact of life, especially for those of us with some degree of wrist problem. I was third in my state in the national spelling bee in the eighth grade and yet I thank the gods daily for the passive spelling checker in Outlook Express, which saves me from the errors of my aging eyes and hands. I only wish Explorer had the same capability in text areas.
Yours is more of the "blame the user" philosophy that is endemic to the UNIX world. Errors happen. Humans are fallible. Software should try to prevent them and help you correct them, not laugh at you for making them.
Tim
Did you ever read the Release Notes? It's all in there. Where else would you like us to put it?
Gerv
Gervase Markham is a Christian
:-)
Absolutely. But I'm not sure why you say it as if it's an insult.
and has also been arse licking the mozilla devs to secure an internship.
Definitely. I secured this job entirely through ass-kissing; I didn't do any work on the project before at all. In fact, I worked on Konqueror for a year and a half.
mozilla is the best web browser in existence
There's no such thing as the best web browser in existence - they all have different strengths and weaknesses. But Mozilla does rock
Gerv refuses to worhsip at the 'Church of Emacs'.
Absolutely. I'm an nedit user, although I sometimes use vi for checkin comments because I'm too dumb to set CVS up to work with nedit by default.
Gerv
Ah, my bad. I have only done this on machines without NS4 installed. I guess it looks for genuine Netscape first, and then falls back to Mozilla, instead of doing the sane thing, which is installing itself into all plugin directories on your system. Or even better, displaying a list of installed browsers and asking which to install into.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
dude, don't give trolls the time of day. This one especially doesn't deserve it.
:-)
Everyone's worth the time of day.
Gerv
>Actually the problem is with English. Many
:)
:) there is even a joke for that. There are many words like that !! and many many exceptions, and most French people are delighted by this complexity.
>(perhaps most?) languages are actually spelled
>the way they sound. Even loan works are
>transformed so they match the local spelling
>rules.
Well this is probably completely off topic, but couldn't resist.
Obviously you didn't learn French at school
When I began learning English I was delighted to see how words are actually, mostly spelled as they are. In French (and I guess in many other languages) you have so much exceptions, due to mainly to historic reasons. One of the most famous is for instance "De Broglie" which is the name of a famous quanta theory scientist actually the father of the theory is pronounced "Debreuil", and this is the "only" name in French which follow this particular rule ! go figure
In fact, I think that English is one of the most pragmatic language, a lot of thing have been simplified, and this really a good thing. French people have vehemently refused a spelling reform (proposed by a minister of the government !!! )
When I began learning English I was delighted to see how words are actually, mostly spelled as they are. In French (and I guess in many other languages) you have so much exceptions, due to mainly to historic reasons.
Actually, French is probably the only Western language with *worse* spelling problems than English. Most languages like Spanish, Italian, or German have far more regular spelling than either English or French.
It's as simple as 'export EDITOR="(insert path to favorite editor here)"'
Absolutely. I'm an nedit [nedit.org] user...
Cool! My already high opinion of Gerv has increased significantly :-) Really, nedit is just so cool. I mostly use it to write VHDL code.
95% of the users don't know anything about software development and software quality and are stuck with Windows and even don't know that something else exists... Your argument is bad and you probably know it.
Duh, Spaceballs.
"When will then be now?"
"Soon!"
'nuff said. Show me the IE bug week.
Tarkwyn.
Thanks very much :-)
Gerv
When I first installed Mozilla I noticed that the Macromedia installer looks for Netscape.exe. It only does this after it has already installed the plugin itself, though. You can give the installer your Mozilla directory instead of Netscape, and the plug in will work fine. The installer might crash or ask for a reboot, but you can ingnore that once the NPSWF32.DLL file is in the Mozilla/Plugin directory.
It only needs to know where Netscape.exe is to launch a browser and send you to the Macromedia website for some promotional junk.
Once you've got a Mozilla installation working with Flash, just copy the plug-in directory to any future Mozilla installations. I haven't had to install any plugins since 0.8.3 or something.
Mozilla
"The customer is always right" means "the customer is *always* right" because the customer is telling you what they think of the good or service.
Are you saying that if the customer thinks "mozilla sux0rz; ie r00lz" is a good bug report, then "mozilla sux0rz; ie r00lz" is a good bug report?
provide a really simple one-field form, submit, and then say "thanks" and ask more questions.
But if you already know exactly what questions you're going to ask, why not just ask them on the Bugzilla Helper?
problem: "it blue screens" and what should it have done? "it should not blue screen"
If Bugzilla Helper b*tches about empty fields, would you mind filling in "Steps to Reproduce" telling exactly how to make Mozilla bluescreen?
Implement them myself? perhaps, but I'm a smart guy and if other people don't see the wisdom of my suggestions then there's a too strong a likelihood that my changes would make it in anyway, so I don't want to waste my time.
Just make a chrome that has such a checkbox linked to a JS pref, and make a new bug with your diffs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
File Edit View Bookmarks Help | http://slashdot.org All on one line.
Then write such a theme.
And please scrap the crap with the honking big "M" icon so the bar doesn't have to be so thick.
There already are several themes like this. Including them in the default install would make the download size too big for those who do not have the resources to move their families to areas that offer high-speed Internet access.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Every week should be bug week, and not just for Mozilla. The fact is that if we want software to perform up to our expectations, we need to fix it, or at least explain our gripes to someone with the proper skills. Bugzilla is one such mechanism, but in a sense, every project on Sourceforge would greatly benefit from this kind of support.
Sometimes just showing interest is enough to motivate a developer to pursue his efforts; just think about it: why spend all your time working on something that no one else will see ? Many open-source projects fall victim to underappreciation, and are quickly abandoned. They don't ask for money, so at least give them a few minutes of your time. It's really all it takes.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
And this matters... because... why? Honest question: how exactly do someone's religious beliefs affect in the least their ability to code?
I didn't say it failed, i said it was an embarrasment.
And your evidence and exact arguments for this statement are..?
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
I learned French at school (to a reasonably high level) and I didn't find its spelling to be a problem. It took about two minutes to learn that the -ent ending in prennent (for example) is not pronounced, and it hasn't been a problem since. You learn pronunciation by listening to native speakers, not by any other system and certainly not from reading. I didn't find the various unpronounced consonants to be a hindrance when learning or writing the language; in fact they were helpful because they show the *meaning* (often indicating similarities with English).
I've also learnt German and Italian and I have to say that the phonetic spelling you are keen on was not really a big deal. It didn't make much difference to the ease of learning to read, speak and write those languages.
Most days I read and write a lot more than I speak or listen. So there's no reason to think that pronunciation should be primary and everything else should follow from that. OTOH, if you were starting from scratch developing an alphabet for a previously not-written language then phonetic encoding is the simplest way to start.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
French is kind of funny, in that, in general, you can figure out the pronounciation from the spelling, but there's absolutely no hope of going the other way. There are _tons_ of silent letters, but the rules are followed well enough that you can usually figure out which letters aren't pronounced. (Of course there are exceptions like the ones you point out.)
At the other extreme from English and French is Finnish. It's spelled exactly the way it sounds, right down to long and short consonents. It's pretty neat. In English the difference between "balled" and "baled" is in the vowel, in Finnish the vowels wouldn't change, but the length of the consonent would be different.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow