One of the projects I’m working on during my OPW internship is triaging mentored and good first bugs. [good first bug] is the tag used in the whiteboard in bugzilla.mozilla.org to signal that a bug could be a good first step to work on for newcomers to Mozilla. A [mentor=x] tag is also added in the whiteboard if that bug has a mentor assigned to it who can help developers working on it.
Triaging good first bugs and mentored bugs means running through those and making sure that they are current and still valid (Most of that bugs are a little stale but valid, other are not valid anymore). Another goal is unassigning inactive bugs and let them free for a new person to work on it. One of the bug days organized by Bugmasters is that of Mentored Bugs. Even if there is no active Bug Day it is possible to work on that in any moment. During this activity I’ve noticed this one bug 854952 and I’ve decided to try to work on it :).
- I’ve started reading about how to contribute to the Mozilla codebase,
- I’ve contacted the mentor assigned to that bug. I’ve spoken with him trying to understand the work to do.
- The bug has been assigned to me and I’ve started to work!…my [good first bug]!.
After the bug has been assigned to me
- I’ve downloaded the Firefox source code and built it.
- I’ve started exploring the source code for understanding which part I needed to take under control;
- I’ve implemented the changes needed. I’ve submitted my patch asking for needinfo before having a definitive patch to submit.
My patch has been approved and added to mozilla-central repository and it will be available in Firefox 25 even if it is still visible from the Nightly 26.0a1 (2013-08-06). It involves changes in the fullscreen permission prompt and the changes have been required css and XUL knowledge other than a minimal understanding of Mercurial and Javascript. I’ve worked on Mac OS but during the development process I’ve tested it on Windows, too. So I’ve learned how to build Firefox on other platform,too. (and with my Windows machine with only 4 GM RAM it’s not so quick 😉 )
This is the result of my work 🙂
Current Fullscreen Permission Prompt
While this was the previous prompt.
Previuous Fullscrren Permission Prompt
I’ve changed text and buttons’ order on UNIX systems, added a background image and halved the border-radius to make the prompt prettier 🙂 . I need to thanks my mentor Jared Wein and all the developers’ community, that can be reached on #introduction channel of irc.mozilla.org, if my good first bug has been RESOLVED FIXED in a short period of time and now I’ve learned a little bit more 🙂