Beginner's Guide to Hacking Firefox
Hacking Firefox is a bit of a guide for all of those people who show up and say “I want to work on Firefox, where do I start?” Feel free to point any and all such people here, or comment here about things that would help serve that target audience.
Also, for those who are wondering, I intend to spend Wednesday and Friday reviewing patches for trunk (not 1.5). I know there’s a lot of good nuggets in there, and I’m sorry I haven’t been managing the queue as aggressively as I should have been. The problem will get better as we go on, but more eyes are the key and will continue to be the key.
The big missing “feature” in those “hacking guides” is how to submit the patch on bugzilla, how to ask for review, and how to get the patch landed.
I’ve submitted patches myself, some of which got landed, but I still don’t know what exactly to ask for, to who, where and when, when it comes to submitting another patch.
Knowing how to use the review switches and who to ask for review is absolutely fatal.
I think it would be helpful to elaborate a little on how to identify “what matters”. Or at least state that if what you think matters differs from what the reviewers think matters, there is little chance of even getting a comment from a reviewer in your bug. I have patches in Bugzilla that have been awaiting review for literally years (counting the times I’ve had to revise them due to bitrot and re-request review). Some of them I’ve just obseleted and given up on.
I realize it’s a matter of prioritizing resources, and this is nothing you haven’t heard before. But through lack of reviews or other feedback I’ve been driven from being actively interested in hacking Firefox to being fairly cynical about the whole process. I still love Firefox and actively recommend it to everyone I know, but I doubt I’ll be trying my hand at hacking it again; it’s a complete dead end and simply not worth my time.
The last line of the “Build the Fox” section is “If I can go from “never compiling anything” to “building on win32″ in an hour or so.”, and it seems to be missing a “then…” part.
Also, shouldn’t “role” be “rule” in the last line of the “Changing the User Experience” section?
For win32:
Build instructions for Borland C++ Builder would be great.
hello. it’s a nice day for your ideas…
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