Author Archives: Josh Matthews

Megazeux debugger on github

The official Megazeux repository recently moved to github, allowing me the opportunity to create my own fork and move my debugger work into a more public sphere. Accordingly, you can now visit my repo for all the most recent robotic … Continue reading

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Getting involved with Mozilla

I realize that while I’ve been contributing to Mozilla since last July, I’m still quite new to a lot of the process and knowledge that more experienced developers take for granted. Therefore, I’m going to document the steps I’ve taken … Continue reading

Posted in mozilla | 19 Comments

Faster mercurial patch queue merging with emacs

As a follow-up to my previous post about merging mq reject in emacs, I thought I’d share some improvements to the process that I’ve made since then. (defun switch-hg-reject () (interactive) (let ((other-file (if (string= (substring (buffer-file-name) -4 nil) “.rej”) … Continue reading

Posted in code, emacs, mozilla | 7 Comments

Applied knowledge

I think I’m starting to feel more at home in the Mozilla codebase. It’s an exciting feeling when you can actually start answering other people’s questions instead of always being on the asking end.

Posted in mozilla | 5 Comments

Cross-compiling with MinGW on Fedora

My goodness, I’m impressed. Having released the first iteration of my robotic debugger, I was informed that the fork()/exec() combo isn’t portable to Windows. Nobody volunteered any patches immediately, so I decided to read up on cross-compiling since I really … Continue reading

Posted in code, fedora, megazeux, projects | 7 Comments

Break me off a piece of that Megazeux debugger

Breaking news: breakpoints now exist in the debugger. There’s no indication that they exist until execution reaches them unless you look in the console window , but they’re there! Next up: differentiating between active line, current line, and line + … Continue reading

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How to discourage a project contributor

Replace all of the contributor’s code in one large commit Use none of the original code in the new revision Include thousands of lines of code churn in addition to the multi-thousand line rewrite in the commit Use a commit … Continue reading

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Dealing with mercurial patch queue rejects in emacs

Since Mozilla has embraced mercurial, and especially patch queues, with open arms, I get to deal with rebasing patches frequently. There are two ways this can happen – either you set up an external merge tool like meld to handle … Continue reading

Posted in code, emacs, mozilla | 6 Comments

Make ye a hydra

I’m interested in playing around with Dehydra to see whether I can create a pre-review checker, hopefully to lessen the amount of nits that inevitably crop up in any patch submitted on Bugzilla. However, as always, the immediate hurdle is … Continue reading

Posted in dehydra, mozilla, projects | 1 Comment

Building Rosegarden trunk

I’m working my way through building Rosegarden from SVN on Fedora 12, and thought I would jot down my settings for posterity. My default QTDIR was incorrect for Qt4 (/usr/lib/qt-3.3), which made configure fail. Following a patch in a gentoo … Continue reading

Posted in code | 1 Comment