webdev – Page 2 – Nigel Babu

Another Launchpad Bug Fixed!

On Tuesday, I managed to land a fix for another Launchpad bug. This one probably was my first non-trivial bug fix and also older than any other bug I’ve attempted (4-digit bug!)

Earlier, during page load, Launchpad would take each bug, search if its, valid, get the title, and show tooltips. This feature was removed to reduce page load times and timeouts. Instead, anything that matches the bug pattern gets linked whether the bug is valid or not. Obviously, less friendly, but much faster. One of the days, there was a general complaint about this in #launchpad-dev and Ian Booth mentioned that its probably trivial to fix with the link checking bits he wrote for branches. I jumped in when I saw a chance to get mentored for a bug.

Fixing the bug involved, first adding a class to all the bug URLs, then grabbing all the URLs with that class and posting it as JSON to check-links internal API, which uses the search to verify valid/invalid bugs. Then, it returns a list of invalid bugs. Fixing this including writing python and JavaScript code; a first, for my fixes to Launchpad. I broke a gazillion tests with my fixes though. Twice, I submitted it to ec2 and failed thanks to b0rked tests. Finally, on third try, I caught all of them and its now merged to devel. It is working on QA Staging if you want to give it a try.

Looking for vim

Yesterday, I was trying to find how to get a terminal inside vim, like the embedded terminal in gEdit and Kate. Look what I found out instead!

I have no words.

RTFD and Summit

Writing documentation isn’t easy. And maintaining up-to-date documentation isn’t easy either. readthedocs.org is a Django project which was written as part of Django Dash It is backed by RevSys, Python Software Foundation, and Mozilla Webdev. We can write our docs in Sphinx and import it into Read the Docs.

I’ve just got it setup for summit. New contributors to Summit can see its developer documentation at summit.rtfd.org

Summit improvements and bug fixes

‘If I do that, I might break Summit!’

That’s something often heard at UDSes by organizers. Indeed, Summit has historically had stability issues, especially during the high-usage week of a UDS. But Summit is starting to outgrow it’s troubled youth, gaining better code, better testing, and most importantly, more stability.

The Summit team, consisting of Michael Hall, Chris Johnston, and I, has been hacking on Summit much more this cycle than ever. We even had a few new contributors this cycle. Our focus this cycle was to make it more stable first, and then more usable. There are lots of UI fixes that people have requested. We only haven’t gotten to them because we want Summit to be very stable this cycle. If you’d like to help us make Summit more awesome, please file bugs on things that you think Summit should do or places were Summit sucks. We can’t promise anything, but its great to nail down things we should fix.

The Summit team has fixed a whole bunch of bugs this cycle. Big shout out to Chris Johnston and Michael Hall for setting the speed of development early on. Before I reached home back from UDS, there were I think 4 MPs for Summit (!?!). We’d also like to thank Maris Fogel for helping us setup a test framework. We’d like Summit to be more stable and having unit tests drives us in this direction.

We’ve been busying making Summit much more awesome!

Helping with breakpad

Wednesday was a fun day. I finally decided to take the plunge and step in and help with Breakpad Fine day to make that decision too, since the Breakpad status meetings are on Wednesdays at 11 am Pacific Time. I ended up being on the call via Google Voice. (Side note: Skype on linux had problems with Mozilla toll-free number).

I now have editbugs privilege on bugzilla and I already fixed my first bug on Breakpad!