I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too | Hacker News Reader

I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

marti.us

319 pointsmartius36 comments

I've been working with new contributors for some years now. Here are some advices:

- find a mentor. It will helps a lot (use http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/); - for the first bugs, writing code is not usually the hard part. Understanding bugzilla and writing tests are; - ask for a commit access level 1 early to have access to the try servers (to run the tests); - finish what you start. Bug is fixed when it lands, not when a patch is attached; - mozilla hackers are nice people, ask questions on IRC. There's no stupid questions (we all started from zero too);

Everything will get much easier after the first bug fix. And motivation grows a lot once you have finally landed some code :)

The mentor part is _huge_. Navigating the Mozilla world (Is that info in a wiki? Where are the docs for this? How do you know who to ask questions to?) is a learned skill, and at the beginning it's a big deal to have someone who, even if they don't know the answers to your questions, will know how to find the answers.

In addition, come on #introduction and ask questions. People are ready to help there when they see a question.

#developers will be another usual place to ask for help, but for beginner questions come to #introduction

But on the weekend, be patient, the chance of getting an answer is pretty low but some people do volunteer on the weekend.

Lastly, check out http://codefirefox.com/ to get started.

The best way to get started is to fix something you spot as bug.

It would be helpful if the Mozilla Bugzilla had some way of opting in to identifying that you have a mentor, so that it would be easy for reviewers to see, "hey, this person's working pretty hard on this bug, but he hasn't declared a mentor. We should suggest that he find a mentor."

I say this as a person who wasted two years working on a Firefox patch, which, in hindsight, would have landed in a month or two if I'd had a mentor. (Not that I'm bitter.) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347174

As of a few weeks ago, bugzilla has a "mentor" field which is being used to identify bugs that are good for new contributors to work on and the correct person to mentor them. It would certainly make sense for someone looking to work on a bug with no suggested mentor to ask for one. If you have any suggestions for how to make this work well in the UI, it would be good to hear; expecting people to notice "this bug doesn't have a mentor field so I should ask for one" seems rather unlikely to work.

The bug that you worked on was a bit of an outlier in the sense that:

* It modified relatively complex parts of the code. * There was initially no (HTML) spec for the feature. * There was initially insufficient information to know what the spec for the feature ought to say.

So I think a mentor might well have told you "this is not a good first bug". Of course that make it all the more impressive that you pushed through the difficulties and got the patch landed and the spec fixed along the way. Thank you for that! The main delays seem to have been waiting for review, which a mentor may or may not have been able to help with depending on whether there were other less-busy qualified reviewers, and waiting for the patch to land, which these days we have a better process for and so which wouldn't happen again.

I asked around on IRC after the fact; it was generally agreed that I should have requested other reviewers rather than waiting months for feedback. If only I'd known!

But that's kind of my point. "Mentored bugs" is an interesting approach, but normally people have mentors, not bugs, and I think that having a "mentor/mentee" field on user profiles may be the right approach for Mozilla; the field would show up on comments/patches I post.

That way, the reviewer could have seen on my profile that I'm new to fixing Mozilla bugs and unmentored, and in his first review, he could have suggested, "I think you should fix these things, and BTW, I think you should find a mentor to shepherd you through this process."

I did it! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548763

Unfortunately it took quite a long time, the Mozilla process is quite confusing to a newcomer, even one with a lot of open source project experience. I definitely second the recommendation of finding a mentor.

I don't think I would have been able to get my two patches into Mozilla if it wasn't for the mentored bugs program. It's incredibly useful and I wish more projects would implement it. ahemopenstackcough.

openstack is a "commercial" open source. Several (if not most) developers who contribute are paid by "companies" - so typically new "contributors" find mentors within their "company"

In your post you mentionned that a goo way to start working with open-source project it to look for smaller scale projects to contribute on github. If been working hard to make it easier for people to find interesting/smaller projects on github by creating the /r/coolgithubprojects and the http://coolgithubprojects.com/ website lately. It's not perfect but anyone who's looking to contribute and find interesting will (I hope) find these tool useful. They're not perfect yet but we'are working hard to making open source project sharing as easy as possible!. My 2 cents.

Thanks for that, I'll have a look and mention it if I make a follow-up post.

I think that good small projects can be plug-ins to bigger projects, or a library that someone use in a project.

I have also created a site designed to help people find smaller scale Github projects. You can find it here : http://gilles-leblanc.github.io/dispatcher/

I've done this a few times for bugs that have personally annoyed me. Gotta say, it's easy to get started and the reviewers are amazing.

I wonder how much of his positive experience is due the fact that he decided to contribute to Servo instead of one of the "main" Mozilla projects (Gecko, SpiderMonkey, Firefox etc). Less hairy codebase, smaller community, github-based, and probably lot more suitable low-hanging fruits.

I wrote a patch for Firefox too. While the experience was different, I applied the same method and it worked quite well. As a comment says it: the mentoring part is important, probably even more than the project itself. I saw that when trying to contribute to other large projects.

Contributing to Servo has its downsides too: things move quickly and can break, and many things are really unstable and unfinished.

Servo is fun because there's a lot of low-hanging fruit (just pick an unimplemented CSS property or DOM call and implement it!), and a lot of room for experimentation (want to play with an experimental line breaking algorithm? Go nuts!)

I got a couple patches through to Firefox proper. One was a fairly easy bugfix[1], but the other[2] took me lots and lots of iterations to get correct. The mentor was extremely patient, taking what I think was more time to explain to me how to do it right than it would have taken him/her to just do it themselves.

The worst part for me wasn't understanding the code (though following through some of the XPCOM stuff is tough), but working with Mercurial. I was tempted several times to abandon it and use a git mirror. Anyone that says patch queues are equivalent to git rebase is crazy.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1006656 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=907310

If you dont need to actually push the code to the reposity (which you wont for the first bunch of patches) it is totally fine to use git, the github mirror is at

https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev

and you can just upload patches for review

Mozilla also hosts its own git server: http://git.mozilla.org/

What's kind of skills for programming with Mozilla?

C++, Javascript, Python... or Rust ! :)

The Firefox interface is written in an XML-like language, so you can fix bugs there if you know HTML+CSS.

Or even C, which some parts are written in, although it doesn't look like they're particularly friendly to lots of people changing them (IIRC some of the parsing and lexing code is in C, correct me if I'm wrong).

Most of the C code is in the venerable (Netscape) NSPR and NSS libraries and third-party libraries for media codecs and graphics.

Basically, anything. Have a look at http://www.whatcanidoformozilla.org to have a glimpse on what you can do for the project.

Thank you for sharing that. I had NO IDEA that the Mozilla team had such diverse needs, and had always assumed that it was all over my head.

What can I do for Mozilla? – Please enable JavaScript in your Browser. :)

I think the real take away is that this same experience can be applied to any large open source project that seems daunting to new comers, not just for Mozilla.

I had a similar experience with emscripten (yeah I know, Mozilla too) initially. So I start working on a project with the following steps:

- Download code - Setup environment - Run test suite (if exists) - Play with simple bits of code by hard coding changes and building it to see it's effect. - ... sleep? - Attempt baby bug first

I made one single patch for Mozilla [1], and I love how it was easy for me to receive informations about how to submit a patch correctly and how to improve my fix, even if I have a big language disadvantage (my english is poor).

I hope I'll have the chance to contribute again to this great open source browser.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=935741

Too bad we can't patch IE.

...and JavaScript. And HTML.

...but can I patch the look and feel of the user interface, or are we not permitted to patch superficial things that affect "branding" and user experience?

I liked Firefox 28, not Firefox 29 and up.

Everything is discussed via meetings and mailing lists. I guess you can not make significant changes to the UI, but you can contribute by writing an extension.

You can create patches that change the interface and/or propose UI changes. They will go through an additional ui-review though. Sometimes the result will be that writing an add-on would be a better fit for a feature or UI change.

Also, if your proposal is around reverting something to a pre-29 state, it has probably already been discussed a lot.

Given that people have written add-ons to do just that, there's no need to even make patches for it.

The "Classic Theme Restorer" add-on works pretty well and has a lot of preference to tweak the UI to your liking:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemer...

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