This week’s Random Notes

Status Updates

Zach Church

I got some comments on my first patch: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504122

Blake posted a few coding convention changes I need to take care of, and Andrew Sutherland said I should use the built-in tab persistence to reopen a tab. I've done what Blake suggested, and I'm now working on contacting Andrew to get some clarifications.

Tim Miller

So this week has been busy and not so productive. Most of my week was taken up with projects for other classes. When I did have time to work on this, I decided it would be a good idea to update so I could do a diff and submit a patch. But after doing so it would not compile again. I spent several hours on Saturday trying to figure out what went wrong, and as far as I can tell everything is the same as last time it compiled successfully. I'm pretty frustrated at this point.

Marcel Guzman

Kefu Zhao

I am sorry that I didn't do anything productive this week because I came back to China for Chinese new year and it was a really a busy week. I will make up the work next week.

Lindauson Hazell

This week I've been experimenting with different build commands, and modifying different ui elements in the default controller. So far, I've used "make -s libs tier_app", "make -s libs_tier_app", and just "make". They don't seem to be causing any effect on the menu items in Shredder, except now the Shredder app is failing to launch (I'm not making this up). I'm sure it's something simple though. However, I'm thinking I should just download the latest build and start over.

My impression is that I am editing the wrong file. I am resolving undefined ui elements (i.e. menu buttons) that do not appear to be passed through the default controller. I am editing the mailWindowOverlay.xul. If anyone knows of a different file I should be editing, please let me know.

p.s. This week and the next are my last to complete my remanding courses at UVI, as such, I'm probably going to be a M.I.A. I'll be back in full swing, in about a week or so...

Evan Stratford

Still no luck on the thread-safety issue. In any event, I'm rather busy this week with a student-run theatrical production on campus. To compound matters, a misguided attempt to improve hardware acceleration performance on my lackluster integrated card ended up destroying X Server instead, leading me to upgrade to Karmic Koala; I fortunately managed not to lose anything in the process. I'll have to punt to next week.

Wei Xian Woo

This week I continued working on my unit tests for the session store manager. Initially, I thought that xpcshell-based tests would work but realized soon enough that it didn't since Thunderbird's session store manager is not accessible from the XPCOM layer unlike the Firefox one. I also figured out later that the Firefox unit tests for session store used a test framework called Chrometests, something we are not currently using in Thunderbird (ref: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Unit_Test_Ideas). I e-mailed Blake about this and he thinks Mozmill should suffice and I spent the remainder of the week working with Mozmill and figuring out how to cause Thunderbird to crash from one of my test cases. I played around with the "Crash Me Now!" extension - I couldn't get it to install initially until I modified the install.rdf file and repackaged the xpi. However, after I got it to install it seems like it still didn't work in Thunderbird.

Apart that, based on Blake's comments for Zach's first patch, I also made the suggested coding convention changes.

Who’s writing the blog post this week?

Kefu Zhao