2016 Challenge : Week #10

If you did not, read the initial blog post announcing the challenge

Week 10 here we are ! 42 left to go, that can’t be a bad thing :-). Let’s not panic, everything’s gonna be ok.

At the start of the week, I was waiting for Brian Grinstead to review a patch for Bug 1246514, which aimed to switch the devtools option panel from XUL to HTML. Brian just got back from a week off and he had so much to catch up with that he couldn’t look at the review until Thursday.

I aim for one bugfix a week, but the timespan I have is a little narrower. As I don’t have commit access, there must be someone from the team landing the patch for me. And because it’s their daily job, it’s unlikely they do it on the weekends. So that’s 2 days off my week. Moreover, the patch is pushed onto an integration branch, fx-team. It then needs to be merged by a sheriff to mozilla-central. This extra-step could take from a couple hours to one day. So ideally, I want to have my patches r+’d by Thursday evening.

So to make this week a success, I took a simple-ish bug, Bug 1181839. The goal of the bug was to import an shared helper js file on the head.js which is used for the tests in the animationinspector folder. Patrick Brosset gave me a hand on this one, pointing me to files where he had already done this kind of job. After some minor comments and a new patch, My patch was r+, landed on Thursday night and the bug was resolved on Friday, just in time !

You may ask, how’s the XUL bug went ? Well, I made some mistakes and I had to fix them. I split the patch up in 2 to separate the bug fixes from the eslint’s ones. I pushed them on Friday and I’m now waiting for review on this.

During the week, I also worked on Bug 1250835, but I did not took it too far, I’ll hopefully talk about it next week if I succeed to submit a patch for it.

I also add a quick chat on IRC with Honza ( @janodvarko ), as he was deploring the lack of collapsible group in the console. I did a quick search and saw that there was already a bug filed for it, which I assigned to myself. There already are patches submitted to the bug, so my work should be to merge it properly in the codebase, as it might have slightly changed.

In other news, I attended the devtools weekly video meeting on Tuesday. The meeting is open and Patrick invited me to join it when we met in Dijon. It was quite intereseting to see what the team was working on. Mainly, triaging bugs, trying to fix intermittent test failures (called oranges), and killing devtools’ uservoice. It was also great to attend a english-spoken meeting — I love to exercise my foreign languages skills.

This meeting made me think about an enhancement for Bugzilla Timeline. As the team was talking about triaging ( assigning priority to bugs, from P1 - much needed - to P5 - that’s a terrible idea, and you should feel bad having filed this one ), I thought that showing the unresolved, higher priority bugs first could help a Bugzilla user to better visualize what she or he needs to do. For doing this, I used Promises ( to make all the API calls at the same time) in conjuction with Array.reduce ( to display the bug in the right order ). I might write something about this pattern during the week, so stay tuned !