Use Tables!

As some of you may know, recently we (ChatZilla) are being screwed
by two bugs in Mozilla’s Core:

• Bug 319219 alias Bug 318419 alias Bug 291386: timers cause your commands and messages to get lost, or get you kicked off the server because we try and use ping / who / ison commands multiple times a second. Not like we want to, but since timers in Mozilla are somewhat broken of late…
• No bug filed yet. For some reason, Gecko thinks it’s funny to give some css rules line numbers like 18234154 - from a css file with less than a 1000 lines, that is. Of course, once it starts giving out random line numbers, the rules get applied in the wrong order, and the cz output document looks horrible. Yay. Of course, this screams ‘minimal testcase’ more than anything else, but here’s the catch(es):
  • No matter how hard we try, not everyone can reproduce this
  • There doesn’t seem to be any reliable pattern in when it screws up. It just does, at times
  • Even a ‘minimal’ testcase would still involve any amount of: a chrome xul document, with a <browser> with type=chrome, loading a chrome:// url html document, modifying that using the DOM to include a chrome:// url css file, which @imports another chrome:// url css file. We know for a fact that all these problems didn’t exist until we set the browser to type chrome to cope with other Firefox stuff (damn you, xpcnativewrappers). Why type=”chrome” and the CSS Parser can’t go through one door together, couldn’t tell you. I’d ask bz, but he’s on holiday for now, so we’re just screwed unless and until someone either figures out what causes this, makes a minimal testcase, or, heaven forbid, has steps to reproduce which mean everyone can actually see the bug…
    Edit: Now bug 321195

Sigh. So, Gecko, die.

Incidentally, as if this wasn’t enough yet, my exams suck, and I have no time to do work on CZ at the moment. I wonder if the ~8 days before new year will be enough. Time will tell

Since other people are doing it, and Translatio, Imitatio, AEmulatio
(Translate, Imitate, Improve) is the way of the blogs, here goes:

Done today:

• Enable mod_rewrite and actually make it work (Damn you Debian config files!)

Todo:

• Bug rginda about bug 192091 until he answers me
• Do an additional round of bugs this weekend, to catch-up-before-being-there with my exam week that starts December 19th
• Design a database structure for my first ever freelance project (for a friend)
• Fix the runlevel on my laptop so it runs fluxbox / gnome immediately. Decide whether I actually like fluxbox. Decide whether I like gnome. Maybe go back to KDE as I’m more used to it.
• Fix my chromeEnum plugin to actually work again, now with totally OO directory structure, so it can easily (well, in my dreams, anyway) be used in a xul tree.
• Get Mozilla developers to make trees easy to use before I need them. Alternatively, dive into docs so I can use them regardless of how much they suck.
  Latter will have a negative effect on mood.
• Play more AOE 3.
• Somehow do all the above and scrape all my exams as well.
• Apply for a minor in Computer Science, and the Honours Programme, at my university.

Ah, I’d forget it. In other news, ChatZilla 0.9.69 has been released. Furthermore, there are now 132 open bugs left. I’m not sure I’m going to make it anymore

That’s right, at the end of October I set myself the goal of trying
to make sure there are < = 120 bugs on the ChatZilla open bug list before new year. At that point there were around 140 bugs left, so we were looking
at fixing around 30 bugs (given the fact that new ones are filed every now and then, too).

Right now the bug list has 132 bugs, and there are 6 open bugs
that are waiting for review, one waiting for checkin,
one other which might be checked in (has review, unclear whether we actually want a checkin)

So, we’re making good progress, and I hope we can pull it off by the end of the year. The only problem I’m seeing is that in 2 weeks,
I have a week to prepare for exams, and the next week I actually have the exams. Then the last one week of december, there’s obviously other
obligations for lots of us

PS: set your counters, 0.9.69 will be released off trunk on December 4th!

Edit: you may be
interested to know that here I have a list of the bugs I still want to fix before newyear (probably not going to succeed
in doing them all, but hopefully enough to make the target of 120 open ones before that time). Every week the list here changes with a semi-random pick out of that list that tells me what bugs I should work on. I don’t pick them
myself because, knowing me, I’d fix all the easy ones first and then fail to fix the medium/hard ones in the end .

Edit 2: patches for all the bugs for this week - and it’s only wednesday!

Edit 3: putting that up is just stupid, of course, since by now I need to do something else for one bug, so I’m not done yet