New Patch Maker AvailableThursday September 27th, 2001Gervase Markham writes: "I've written some Perl software called Patch Maker that enables people to contribute patches and bugfixes to Mozilla using only a nightly build - i.e. without having to set up a build environment. Currently, it only works on Linux, even though setting up a build is easiest on that platform - the plan is to shake the bugs out there and also to get help porting it to Windows and Mac, where building is a lot harder. The web page is up, and I'm looking for lots of good feedback. Please, try it out and let me know what you think. And if you are a Perl hacker on Windows or Mac, I'd also like to hear from you :-)" There is a MacPERL utility. I'll volenteer to look into setting this up on OS 9. Excellent. I've just put up version 0.2, which is the result of me going through the "Portability" section of the Camel Book. Your two big things will be a) finding ways to invoke it with options (whatever the Mac equivalent of that is) and setting that up, and b) unjarring chrome - someone here mumbled about MacPerl talking via AppleScript to the unzip program, but I don't know. There's a variable, $macos, which you can use to see if you are on Mac. Currently it only works with OS 9 - is OS X is enough like Linux to use Linux's code? Does anyone care about OS X support yet? Gerv Invoking is not a problem. Unjaring may be, I'll see. OS X has a command line, which works just the same as the average UNIX shell. Not a problem there. OS X uses csh in the terminal, and has Perl, gzip, tar, as well as all the other stuff you'd expect in BSD. Anything that works in both Linux and BSD should work in OSX, unless it requires X (of course, one can install an X server on OS X, but not too many have). My Perl skills ain't up to it, though (mostly I use Perl for CGI and complicated regexps). OK, ran it in OS X and this is what I got: [localhost:/Applications/mozilla-macosX-trunk/Chrome] user% perl pm n Your chrome is not unjarred. Unjarring chrome... US.jar chatzilla.jar classic.jar comm.jar content-packs.jar cview.jar embed.jar en-US.jar error: invalid compressed data to inflate locale/en-US/global/globalOverlay.dtd en-mac.jar help.jar messenger.jar modern.jar pipnss.jar pippki.jar toolkit.jar Chrome unjarred. Please issue that command again. [localhost:/Applications/mozilla-macosX-trunk/Chrome] user% Looks good to me. [hostname and user name have been changed to protect the innocent] why not using the free Archive::Zip Module from CPAN? I don't know for sure but I think it should be cross platform so porting Patch Maker should be much easier :) This is another first in open source development. It opens up contribution to people without programming/CVS/building expertise but who know XUL, CSS, JavaScript, etc. well enough to improve the user interface. I want to thank Gerv for taking the initiative to make this a reality. You can be sure I'll be submitting patches now that these tools are in place! Yes, I know to you and me, it's obvious, but the original article here and a lot of Gerv's Patch Maker page don't make it clear that it's strictly for editing chrome files (CSS/XUL/JavaScript) to fix look-and-feel bugs (or add new bits to it) in chromes/skins. It's nothing to do with the C/C++ source code of Mozilla... Still, it's very cute to be able to bundle up patches for the chrome with just a binary nightly build and Patch Maker - nice work ! Well most of the non browser programs aka mail/news and chatzilla are almost completly xul and js files, would this program help us in editing such programming? It will be useful for editing any of the UI in any of the Mozilla apps. --Asa Any chance of a new keyword or something in Bugzilla to identify the bugs that don't require C/C++ to fix? Or is it possible to find already with some kind of query? Anything under XPapps would be about bugs with the chrome, fixable by altering some XUL or javascript. Anyone wanna port it to windows, so us poor people stuck in MS city can use it ? I need help with the porting. Can you help? :-) Version 0.2 (up now) should work on Windows (with Cygwin) in theory - but I need people on Windows to test it out and see. Gerv I think there is something wrong with the way Mozilla handles the "Modern" theme. When I used that theme, Mozilla crashed every day, and caused my entire computer to crash with it. Since I started using the "Classic" theme, Mozilla has only crashed when I tried the "view page source" thing. It did not crash the entire computer those times. Try uninstalling and then reinstalling. I have only had this kind of crash problem once or twice; uninstalling and reinstalling always fixed it. like anotherone already said try reinstalling, and maybe deleting your profile is a good idea if reinstalling does not work. I had the crash when view page source problem too, but it seems to be only in some builds and already fixed in newer ones. Looks like Cmdr "But Personally, I Use Konqueror" Taco and his intrepid band are at it again. They just posted a link to MozillaQuest's take on this, which has its usual tangential relationship with reality. Sigh. |