Author: JT Smith
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.
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 technlogies – 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:
irc://irc.mozilla.org:6667/#bugweek . 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.
For more information, contact me
. If you plan to attend at some point, please let me know what you are expecting
to get out of the week, so I can be sure it’s provided. 🙂
