bmlk - Bernds memory leaks

2009-06-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

Strong Module Ownership

If you thought that MNG is the poster case for ownership, try dilbert

2008-12-10T11:42:00.000-08:00

Wordle

Its cool how wordle

puts in single picture what drives you internally.

2008-10-19T03:28:00.001-07:00

Why the Bugathon is OK, but does not solve the real problem

The numbers

Gerv did revive the Bugathon. So I went trough the bugs at layout tables to see how many bugs really need a testcase.

I did this in several steps.

search for all bugs that do not contain the keyword testcase but do have a attachment which is named testcase, and assign the testcase keyword.

search for all remaining bugs that do not contain the keyword testcase but do have a attachment which is of type text/html, decide if they are real testcases and assign the keyword

Go through the remaining bugs, that do not contain the keyword testcase. During this step a lot of old unconfirmed showed up that have been WorksForMe. I know from previous experience that WFM's can be for ever not closed, so I closed them aggressively and asked to reopen with a clear explanation whats going on.

I found 6 bugs where a testcase would be beneficial. There are 50 bugs that do not need a testcase but I did not mark them.
So out of 450 bugs only 6 bugs need a testcase.

As a result we have now 400 table bugs with a testcase that are also marked by the keyword testcase.

In the last year 180 bugs got marked fixed in the layout-tables component. 36 of them have been assigned to nobody@mozilla.org and are fixed by other bugs.

In the same time period 136 bugs have been marked as WFM. This means we have roughly for every really fixed bug one WFM.

This hints that one needs to deal with the WFM category.

The `WFM`'s

A triaged bug that ends purely as a WFM is a waste of resources. We waste

the reporters time,

the time spent on triaging and

the time spent on creating a testcase.

So the minimum requirement is that the testcase ends as testcase in our tree.

Yes, wfm too. Could you please flag the bugs you resolve with in-testsuite?
when there is testcase attached to the bug? I think it would be valuable to
add these as reftests because they are often edge cases and it makes sure we
have good code coverage in the tests. (Or even better, make a reftest and
just check it in ;-) ) Mats Palmgren

Reftests

Converting usual teastcases to reftests requires knowledge and time. Its far more efficient to create a reftest when the bug is still present then to create one once the bug got WFM. Currently this is mainly done by the developers and this is where we really waste the most expensive resource that we have.

It would already help tremendously if a testcase would contain the bug and the expected rendering so that files needs only be split. This can be done by nearly everyone who is able to create a testcase.

Such a testcase has the obvious benefit that it can be easily converted into a reftest and it has also the advantage that triaging if the bug is still present becomes very efficient.

Continuous triage

I have seen a lot of bugs that had testcases that linger for years in our database. So if we really care about developer time then it would be far more efficient
to triage the existing bugs properly, to verify that they still exist and to make them compatible to the automated test frameworks rather than trying to get the latest bug out of firefox:general.
This triage requires experience that one only gets trough focus. This means experienced QA folks should take responsibility for fixed components and improve the bug quality in this components in a way that results in checkins into the tree.

Just by looking at the numbers of open bugs one should ask himself is this testcase self explaining in two, three or four years.
Can it be easily judged, that it is still an open bug. And this late triaging is the point where simply reviving the old Bugathon is not good enough. It is typically very difficult to see if a testcases that is WFM is really WFM.

Summary

The question for me looks like do we care for 6 or for 400 bugs. I would vote for the 400. And having on those 400 bugs reftests would help much more than the testcases on the 6 bugs

2008-03-30T07:41:00.000-07:00

test cases required

Rob highlights a important question, when test cases as a requirement are too much for a starting contributor. This is different for UI compared to layout. In layout most people that I know came via the test case reduction (bugathon). So they are used to it. In UI this is different. I would propose to make the test case requirement only for people with CVS write permission. If those refuse they should not have the write permission and beginners will not be tortured.

2008-03-27T23:43:00.000-07:00

Zarro Boogs found.

3 years ago I posted my private Mozilla road map: "drive the number of crash bugs in the layout table component down to zero".

Today is the first day that I am aware off without a known table crash bug in the Mozilla code base. That probably covers all the 8 years that I am around this stuff.

I am very proud of it and its a feeling of relieve.

The big thanks go to Boris, Jesse, Martijn and Mats.

2006-10-18T01:56:00.000-07:00

Code Review Avoiding Patches

I am a big believer in code review , it is what makes Mozilla strong. I am very suspicious when people try to avoid review. Regardless what the excuse is at the end usually the code has errors that proper review would easily have been resolved before check in. This was my main concern with the initial ~~Phoenix~~ Firefox development. Typically I am not a big fan of Mozilla corporate decisions as they are frequently done behind the scenes. I blame this to the bad Carma of Mountain View which is inherited from the old Netscape days.

However there is one thing where I stand 100% behind Mozilla and that is the trademark policy. If you say a thing is a Firefox than it has to be a Firefox and nothing else. If Debian makes modifications and then refuses to get them properly reviewed by people who understand the code the output is predictable: lower quality than the original code base. Mozilla says this lower quality product shall not spoil our name and is IMHO right to do so.

So lets have a walk what that means:
I installed a while ago Ubuntu on my brothers machine to get rid of spyware etc. At this time Mozilla 1.7 was shipped and I was pretty unhappy with the Firefox development cycle (see above). I launched the application and found the layout debugger?!? Ubuntu does not use a typical bugzilla so i was pretty lost but anyway I filed the corresponding bug . So what was the root cause of this bug. Somebody at Debian spoiled it till today ( search for extensions=all or follow bug 393859). Nobody at Mozilla, who has at least a minimal build understanding will approve such a patch. And I think that it would be good for Debian too as it would not ship applications with a broken user interface and dubious security.

This would certainly limit the freedom of Debian to modify the source. But why should users of Debian and many Ubuntu users suffer from bad preventable code changes?

So to whom it applies: if you need help porting a patch that I have written to Debian because you follow the very bad idea of maintaining the Firefox 1.0.x series (its a security problem in my eyes) file a patch in bugzilla and ask me for review.

UPDATE: I just came across the blog of the Firefox maintainer:

Changes to disable application upgrade (we want that to happen through apt-get) and change some other default preferences,
Changes to fix “make distclean” so that it really cleans the build directory,
Change not to build the “mangle” utility,
Change not to call netstat to generate entropy, which is useless on linux,
Changes to work around bugs with the hidden visibility pragma on gcc,
Changes to make the pango backend actually build correctly,

And you don't want that people who wrote code review this???? Has the pango backend even a tinderbox? If mozilla has not shipped the test builds before how can that back end have the proper testing?

2006-01-15T05:22:00.000-08:00

Private Bugzilla rules

Assign every regression that my checkins have caused to me.

Assign every crash in table code to me.

crash in table code

Among the top three functions is a function from layout/tables, or it crashes inside nsCSSFrameConstructor.cpp and the function is table related

Put me on CC if something asserts in table code.
Put me on CC if something crashes and a table display type is involved.
Put me on CC if you need advice how to fix a bug and think I should know it.
Put me on CC if you think that I can fix it with a few lines, this rule only applies to Boris, David and Robert.
For all other cases I read daily bugs that changed in the layout tables component.

2005-11-14T09:23:00.000-08:00

nvu in mozilla cvs...

I don't think that Daniel is right. I think he pays the price of keeping nvu outside the mozilla repository.

2005-07-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

HTML acronym tag usage

VISTA

2005-07-13T01:47:00.000-07:00

Autoresolve

It was hight time to wade trough the table unconfirmed and I am pleasantly surprised how well the bugs looked. I am not a fan of bug auto resolution, so hopefully they will run the sweep only after 1.1 has been released.

2005-03-19T10:32:00.000-08:00

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones

I dont believe that browser vendors should specify what they expect other vendors to do. Especially when their rendering engine is far from bug free.

2005-03-16T22:02:00.000-08:00

Printing

I am always fascininated how Microsoft is able to spot the weakness of its competitors.

2005-03-12T02:33:00.000-08:00

Private Roadmap

I thought that the roadmap would be updated more frequently than:

The new, significant roadmap update hoped for early in 2004 has been postponed.

My private roadmap is to drive the number of crash bugs in the layout table component down to zero. I believe with a little help from my friend this is feasable. While the number is small, Martijn and Robert are working hard to make this a longer trip.

2005-02-15T22:23:00.000-08:00

Spyware definition??

From the NY Times:

About 6.8 million computer users have downloaded a test version of the anti-spyware program, according to Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president. Of that number, about three million are now routinely sending monitoring data to Microsoft.

So doesn't that mean: MS tracks user data on 3 million machines? That is probably one of the more successfull spywares.

2005-01-30T01:19:00.000-08:00

Firefox code access

When you start at a new company, what is the first thing you will work on? You will be sent out to important customers to appear as the front end of the company. This does not happen in normal corporations, as it does not happen in mozilla. UI is mozillas front end, I believe its reasonable to limit access to it. So when a new employee starts, she/he will be send to different places in the back office to learn the internals or to make customer support (bugzilla). Mozilla does have a huge back office area (Gecko, Necko, ...), why not explain to new contributors, you have to learn the basics first, getting a full fledged CVS account does demonstrate the commitment to learn the basics before you are allowed to touch the fronted.

2005-01-02T09:13:00.000-08:00

Annoyed Contributor FAQ

This is related to Gerv's blog entry. This is my personal view

If you are unhappy with a mozilla decision that has the word we somewhere mentioned, ask who is we.
If the answer contains one of the words firefox or aviary, thats it. Stop. Go for a beer, but stop to worry. 14+ million downloads should tell you that people steering firefox have made a couple of pretty correct decisions.
Once you passed that critical point, you have to ask yourself, why has that bad decision been made without asking you before.
- Your oppinion does not matter as you did not contribute enough lines to the mozilla codebase (this is for all these weenies at the forums). Even if you have checked in several lines, did you look how many checkins people like dbaron, ben etc have made. Do you have the time to write that many code? Do you really want that?
- Your oppinion does not matter as you don't live in MV. There are some people that have a say even without massive amounts of code checked in, but usually they are staff anyway.
If you bypassed both criteria as the thing that worries you is sooo urgent, can you fix at your own, or does the fix require others to act. Forget the latter.
- Good: I want to be the owner of component xyz
- Bad: Owners.html needs to be updated.

So at this stage you have allready a patch that stands on its own but can't move, its really time to ask mozilla.org

2005-01-01T10:31:00.000-08:00

for reference

The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

2004-12-18T23:38:00.000-08:00

IE in images

2004-12-18T23:08:00.000-08:00

Technology of the month

Microsoft updated their IE website. The top category is Technology of the Month which links to CSS Enhancements in Internet Explorer 6

That document was last updated in March 2001. ???????

I don't know what that is, ignorance or developer sarcasm.

2004-12-16T10:58:00.000-08:00

Experience shows

Will I be ever able to make a bugzilla comment like this one?

This bug is where the real work to fix bug 38486 will go on. That bug is a pile of noise and a useless soapbox on which free-lunch-demanders wish to stand.

2004-12-12T11:49:00.000-08:00

The broken Gecko promise

Sometimes Gecko is not the optimal choice.

2004-12-04T01:20:00.000-08:00

Watch your language

I don't understand why german publications are so in love with war terminology when it comes to Firefox.

Lets see what we already have:

2004-12-01T22:37:00.000-08:00

Hobby vs. job

Hacking mozilla is my hobby, I am not paid for it. When you are on a job you need to implement what your management decides regardless how much you like the decision. When it is your hobby you can stand for your principles. (_{And let somebody who is paid for it to do the dirty work})

2004-11-28T06:48:00.000-08:00

Market vs. personal taste

In 1995 somebody showed me how cool Netscape NN handles email, which was a giant step compared to elm and pine and it did run on a PC compared to the UNIX workstations. I got hooked. I have now my NN email archive transfered since these days from PC to PC. Only after 1.0 I trusted mozilla enough to switch away from NN for mail handling. I browsed with mozilla since M13, but was pretty conservative with the email archive. I use regularly the browser, email, chat, composer, and the dom inspector. I like the tight integration. So up to now I can't see what gain I should have from converting to ff.

As the sharp increase in firefox usage shows my personal taste and the mass market don't coincide. Which isn't necessarily bad. However this increase in market share fulfills my initial intention to work on the project: keep the Internet infrastructure public as opposed to a MS controlled infrastructure. I did not expect it to happen this way, but if firefox spreads the Gecko UA-string, what else should one desire.
_{(Hmm ,a single package with ff, thunderbird, chatzilla and nvu with a decent unified modern theme, but thats probably too much even for Christmas)}

2004-09-18T07:37:00.000-07:00

Gaim Bug wfm

I entered #gaim and people helped me to figure out that there is no .gaim file and this probably a localization issue. But there is a workaround by specifing the folder for the gaim info via -c at the command line. Very friendly people there, they tried to help me to get it running.