Tag Archives: contributors

The Joy of Coding (Ep. 19): Cleaning up a patch

In this episode, I picked up a patch that another developer had been working on to try to drive it over the line. This was an interesting exercise in trying to take ownership and responsibility of something rather complex, in order to close a bug.

I also do some merging and conflict resolution with Mercurial in this episode.

Something else really cool happens during the latter half of this episode – I ask the audience for advice on how to clean up some state-machine transition logic in some code I was looking at. I was humming and hawing about different approaches, and put the question out to the folks watching: What would you do? And I got responses! 

More than one person contacted me either in IRC or over email and gave me suggestions on how to clean things up. I thought this was awesome, and I integrated a number of their solutions into the patch that I eventually put up for review.

Thanks so much to those folks for watching and contributing!

Episode agenda.

References

Bug 1096550 – Dragging tab from one window to another on different displays zooms in – Notes
Bug 863514 – Electrolysis: Make gesture support work – Notes

No, that’s not “it” for Thunderbird…

(Disclaimer: I’m an employee for Mozilla Corp, who works full-time on Thunderbird development. These opinions are my own.)

Today, through various channels, it was announced that continued innovation on Thunderbird is not a top priority for Mozilla.

Now before you all go running around with your heads chopped off saying things like, “Welp, that’s it for Thunderbird!”, or “We’d better fork that mutha!”, stop for a second, and read this.

Thunderbird is not dead.

Not by a long shot.

Please don’t overreact.

We’re simply not going to pour resources into trying to “innovate” on Thunderbird. Users will still be getting an email client that answers to nobody but them. Users will still benefit from stability, performance and security updates from Mozilla. And their mail will continue to land in their inbox, just as it always has.

So please, relax. It’s all good. Let’s not make a mountain out of a mole hill.

I’d also like to ask those people talking about forking Thunderbird… why? Why would you do that, instead of contributing to the core project? You’d be cutting yourself off from us, the people with experience developing Thunderbird, who can help you with your projects. Work with us. We’d love to have you.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to continue testing some kick-ass contributor code. This new Australis default theme is going to blow your mind…