A Pragmatic Perspective by Nino D'Aversa

Lab 7: Modifying Firefox (New Tab Location)

I found this lab challenging because it was difficult to lookup on mxr since the code has changed since the lab was written. Also because SeneNET is useless as it was down for the first half of the lab.

However tracking down the bug lead to tabbrowser.xml, in the addtab method at line 1165 I changed the appendtab line to the following:

// Insert tab after current tab, not at end.
var currentTabIndex = this.mTabContainer.selectedIndex;
this.mTabContainer.insertBefore(t, this.mTabContainer.childNodes.item(currentTabIndex + 1));

After doing this I found that the tabs would be created as desired, after the currently selected tab, however I soon discovered a bug with closing tabs, they did not work, through the recommendation on the wiki I modified line 1228 to the following:

var position = currentTabIndex + 1

Before this it was using the current position based on number of tab nodes. This did not completely remove all bugs I found issues with trying to delete tabs when it was less then 3 tabs remaining, but the lab peroid expired and we were booted out before getting a chance to go further.

I learned that sometimes it may seem simple to change something small like where a new tab appears but it can potentially affect lots of other things that you weren’t prepared to handle or deal with. Changing one line effected many other lines of code, so as with anything else open source, nothing is ever easy!

TryServer: 0.1 Release

Today I’m releasing my 0.1 for the Seneca TryServer, my wiki page can be found here:

I set out to do the following:

-Get BuildBot running locally on my computer
-Understand most/all of the code that was developed last semester
-Build/Design the Account Creation/Login pages

I have been successful in all these areas.

First here is a screenshot of the account creation tool which is up on hera now:

TryServer Registration

I was pleased with how this came out, considering was only able to use .htaccess. Although this is a temporary solution, both Dave and I think LDAP may be the way to go in the future, to run things similar to the way Mozilla has their TryServer. The slight problem with it now is, it sits behind a layer of authentication itself, although this is the desired use case. The sysadmin does not want anyone being able to create accounts, so for now credentials are required to create new accounts. I have mentioned that perhaps restricting access to the @senecac.on.ca would be a solution, but me and Dave are currently waiting on the sysadmin for input.

I also spent quite a bit of time talking with Armen and researching BuildBot. I was successfully able to install Python, Twisted and then finally BuildBot on my local machine. BuildBot has alot of potential I have seen additional bots to send build output to IRC, E-Mail or other web interfaces other then the Waterfall. I think this is very exciting and deserves a bit more research after this semester.

I feel I have a much greater understand for what is required for my final release this semester, the actual conversion to Mercurial (Hg). I am currently considering my options for 0.2, but I want to discuss with Dave first to see what he thinks should be the next step.

TryServer 0.1 Update

Today I was able to do my first substantial thing with the TryServer.

I added the form to create new users/change passwords/remove users. The link can be found here.

Unfortunately the cgi-bin is protected so it requires authentication first, I need to speak with Dave and the Hera Admin to get the permissions changed for this file.

Lab 6: Thunderbird Bug Fix

I spent some time developing a regular expression to solve the problem but once I inquired on IRC about which regex library function to use to implement I was informed by Dave to take a different approach. Just so my work was not in vein the very simple regular expression I developed is:

w+@w+.(w+.)*w+$

Using Regular Expression Tester with the following test data:

a@a.com
a.a@a.a
a.a@a.a.com
S@Y.where

a@.
a@..
a@..f
a@….f
@.
@.com
@a.com
@a
@a.
@a..
@a…com
a@a.a..a
S@Y…where

After abdoning this approach I solved the issue by changing line 198 in mozillanetwerkstreamconvconvertersmozTXTToHTMLConv.cpp

to

if (inString.FindChar(‘.’, pos) != kNotFound && inString.Find(“..”,0) == kNotFound && inString.CharAt(inString.Length()-1) != ‘.’)

I rebuilt thunderbird from the netwerk directory and tested my fix. It worked!

I ran the the following command in the /mozilla directory:

cvs diff -u8p . > patch.txt

which generated my patch.txt which I attached it to my bug.

I found this lab to be very rewarding. It reinforced a lot of the skills of the previous labs plus it gives you a chance to actually do some coding, that does something!

This was my favorite lab thus far.

Lab 5: Bugzilla Tracking Experience

Over the last week I watched David Humphrey on BugZilla. Forty one E-Mails later I realized there is a lot to keep track of during a week. I think it is an excellent way to keep up to date with the happenings for a certain bug. In the push vs pull philosophy I have always preferred the push. It makes much more sense to have updates sent to you, rather then you going around searching for updates.

I think the BugZilla system is excellent and I’m wondering if I can use it on projects in the future?