Getting Your Work Into Mozilla
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4
Steps overview
The steps you take to get your work contributed to Mozilla will undoubtedly vary according to your project, but most or all of the following categories of involvement are absolutely essential in order to be adequately informed and involved in the Mozilla community:
Newsgroups, IRC, web site, helping out | |
The Bugzilla database is where most of the information specifically about the Mozilla code base and its products is exchanged. Go to bugzilla.mozilla.org and use the Query tool to find the information most relevant to your own project. | |
Licensing, commenting, documentation | |
CVS, Tinderbox, Bonsai, build tools, building | |
The Mozilla community incorporates your work into the nightly builds. |
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Pete Collins, Alphanumerica engineer: |
"At Alphanumerica we started our Mozilla development work about a year ago. For our first project, we wanted to come up with a way to recover your browsing session after either the operating system or the browser crashed. "This project turned out to be much harder than we had thought, and it took us about seven months to get it working. In that time we had worked on a number of other projects, including the Aphrodite browser and the Sullivan skin. "When Total Recall, the name of our crash recovery project, was finished and ready to go, we had no idea what to do with it. Even though by the time it was finished we had done a number of other Mozilla projects and were very familiar with Mozilla development, we didn't know how to get Total Recall checked into the Mozilla code.
"We put Total Recall on our site and asked a lot of questions and eventually figured it out. Since Mozilla is becoming a project with more and more outside developers, we felt that what we had learned would be good information for other developers who have patches and projects they want to add to the Mozilla code base. "One of the main things we learned was that everyone at Mozilla is very helpful, but they don't know that you need help unless you ask. When we did finally ask about checking Total Recall into the tree, we were told that they just assumed that we knew what to do with the code but that we just didn't want to check it in." |
In general, you begin the process of getting your work included in the Mozilla project by making yourself known as a trustworthy and capable member of the Mozilla community. The process for making yourself a part of the Mozilla community remains an informal one by design, so the contacts you make and the help you give to other members are very important in establishing your position as one of the Mozilla developers. In fact, it's unlikely you'll be initiated into the Mozilla community without having first exhibited your skills by helping others figure things out.
About Alphanumerica's Total Recall project
It's easy to feel that when you get your code working, you are nearly done. Perhaps you have already pulled the Mozilla source and gotten your own project integrated locally. But if you want to contribute to the Mozilla code base itself, your work begins when you get your own project settled and begin looking for a home in the Mozilla project.
Mozilla comprises a huge number of projects already. Some of them are separate projects that have little to do with the browser; others, like the project described in this article, are additions to the browser itself, new extensions or components that will add to the already huge value of the Mozilla browser.
The front door: www.mozilla.org
The Mozilla web site is the first place you should go to acquaint yourself with the goals and projects in the Mozilla organization. As an open source community, however, mozilla.org is unlikely to welcome you very far in if your familiarity stops with reading and understanding the documents on this web site. Use the links below to start using, building, and learning from Mozilla, and then proceed to the following sections, where your interaction with the Mozilla community begins.
The Projects List is a long and somewhat dated list of the various projects that make up Mozilla. Be aware: Without any better indication of the scope or status of the various projects, this page can quickly lead you down some moribund and ill-conceived byways.
Module Owners offers more specific information about the owners of core modules in Mozilla. You can use the list of module owners to get an idea about how the Mozilla product itself is divided up (and see this division reflected in Bugzilla, where the bugs are assigned to module owners unless someone else is specified), and you can find out who to begin asking questions of in your area.
Build Documentation is a list of current build documentation for different platforms. It's a good idea to set up a build machine, pull the source code using anonymous CVS, and build Mozilla for yourself.
Mozilla Developer Documentation is a long list of documentation available at the mozilla.org web site.
