Gervase Markham wrote:
> Mozilla has a large number of fringe contributors who download the odd
> build, and do a little QA, but have not made the leap to making patches
> and fixing bugs. This could be for a number of reasons, but I'm sure
> that one of them is that the barrier to entry is very high, especially
> on Windows - where you need MSVC++.
This is *the* barrier for me. Well, need to learn C++, too, but as I do
C and java on a daily basis, that can't be too hard :o)
> What would be required for someone to produce patches from a nightly build?
> 1) On Windows, Cygwin - for useful tools, and diff
> 2) A script to convert those patches into patches that could be applied
> to a code tree
> 3) Perl, for the above script - unless anyone wants to write it in awk
> and sed
4) Instructions on how to do this. Where do I get Cygwin, where do I get
Perl, are they free etc.
> The user would unjar their chrome (another Perl script), edit it, run
> diff from the top level chrome dir, munge the patch and attach it to the
> bug. This could then be reviewed, super-reviewed and checked in in the
> normal way, without further munging - i.e. keeping the workload on
> reviewers and super-reviewers as light as possible. If a new patch was
> required, you would just edit further and repeat the process. If you
> were working on two patches in the same file, you'd just install two
> nightlies. The equivalent of a cvs update would be installing and
> unjarring a new nightly, making a diff and applying it to the new chrome
> tree.
This shounds quite workable. I'm all in favor :-)
regards, Esben
