QA/QA Companion Hacking Guide

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Here are some quick steps to get the code, and get to building the QA Companion Extension.

These are quick notes, a more complete and final version will go up on quality.mozilla.org once that site is ready (the non-alpha site).

Get the Code

  1. Ensure you have subversion installed
  2. Check out the code:
    svn checkout http://svn.mozilla.org/qa/qac/

This checks out the code into a qac directory (which is created in the local directory from where you ran the command).

Build the QAC

If you checked out the QAC using the above then do the following: Ensure you have ant installed.

  1. cd qac
  2. ant -f build.xml

This will create a qa.xpi file inside your qac directory. That is the extension file. In order to install it into a build of Firefox, simply drag and drop the .xpi file onto the browser window.

Basic code structure

From the top level:

  • qac/chrome - where the UI, the backend code, the skins and the locales live
  • qac/components - where any self-made XPCOM components will live. Currently houses the chatzilla XPCOM startup handler.
  • qac/defaults - where our default prefs are
  • qac/platform/ - allows us two different CSS styles for our UI based on whether we are mac or windows/linux
  • The flat files that are manifests and .rdf files are our build infrastructure that tie the extension together.
  • qac/chrome/content - this is where all the code is. At the top level directory, we have the high level core functionality and the account creation utilities.
  • qac/chrome/content/tabs/ - This is where the tab specific code and UI lives
  • qac/chrome/locale/ - where the localized string files are
  • qac/chrome/skin/ - the location of the UI resources.