In my work with new Mozilla contributors, I’ve seen a number of people get hung up on the whole .mozconfig voodoo madness. Yes, we made it possible to download the source and build it without having to even think about creating one, but as soon as you want to use a debug build, or build [...]
Posted on October 3rd, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: mozilla | 2 Comments »
There are two takeaway points that I would like to state up front: when you find a bug that’s well-scoped and you have a fairly clear idea of how to fix it, add [mentor=yournickname] to the whiteboard. when stating that a bug is good for someone else to work on, please please add a comment [...]
Posted on September 30th, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: mozilla | 2 Comments »
Two years ago today I sent an email to Benjamin Smedberg saying that I wanted to help out with Electrolysis. I regret nothing except how quickly the intervening time has passed. Bring on two more years!
Posted on August 1st, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: mozilla | 1 Comment »
If you’re a bzexport user, you’ll want to pull the latest revision. It’s recently been getting slower due to the number of http requests that need to be made (the tradeoff here is that it’s also been getting more correct), but I’ve pushed three patches that have reversed that downward slide into the molasses. By [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: code, mozilla, projects | No Comments »
Jim Blandy announced his archer-mozilla pretty-printers for Spidermonkey late last year. I’ve used them a few times while working on some JS proxy bugs, and I’ve found them to be invaluable. So invaluable, in fact, that I’ve written a bunch of pretty-printers for some pain points outside of js/. If this prospect excites you so [...]
Posted on June 22nd, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: code, mozilla, projects | 2 Comments »
If you’ve given my self-serve tools a try (in particular, cancel.py) and had it claim that it couldn’t authorize you, it’s time to give it another shot. Steven Fink, being the wonderful person he is, dove in and found some weirdness going on with my usage of urllib and the self-serve API performing redirections. The [...]
Posted on June 22nd, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: code, mozilla | No Comments »
I spent the past six weeks roaming around Europe with a netbook, and used that time productively to get some work done on Firefox. Part of that involved building on Windows for the first time, and experiencing the joy of pymake. However, I found the extra characters required to fire off incremental builds with pymake [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: code, mozilla | 6 Comments »
Actually, this little trick has been possible for at least a year and a half since I fixed the enhancement request, but I don’t believe it’s common knowledge. When writing something like someEventTarget.dispatch({ run: function() { … }), you can simply use someEventTarget.dispatch(function() { … }) and skip the object goop. It looks cleaner to [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: mozilla | 2 Comments »
The self-serve tools, specifically cancel.py has received some important usability upgrades at the urging of jst and ehsan. Now, simply running python cancel.py will be enough to get you going – you’ll be prompted for your username, password, branch and hg revision. The builds displayed also show their state (running, pending or complete) as well, [...]
Posted on April 16th, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: code, mozilla, projects | 3 Comments »
I’ve seen this come up in several bugs recently, and it’s time to disseminate some knowledge. Here is what an unexpected crash usually looks like: TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | /tests/content/media/test/test_seek.html | application timed out after 330 seconds with no output PROCESS-CRASH | /tests/content/media/test/test_seek.html | application crashed (minidump found) You’re looking at a test harness timeout because of [...]
Posted on March 31st, 2011 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: mozilla | 1 Comment »
CS student by day. Code vigilante by night. No mercy. No surrender.
