Re: New developers looking for a place to join in

Hi Eric,

Thanks for posting to the newsgroup. It's great to hear you've decided to work
on the SVG code. :-)

In reviewing what still needs to be done, these seem to be the major features
that still need the most work:

 * SMIL
 * Text layout
 * SVG Fonts
 * SVG an an image (in CSS, HTML <img>, etc.)

I'm assuming that for you (for a university project) working on a feature is
more desirable than general bug fixing. If I'm wrong there, let me know and I'm
sure I can find plenty of general bugs for you to work on. ;-) (Some may even
just take a three man team three months to complete!)

Of the above, text layout, while a major source of our test failures on the SVG
1.1 testsuite, is probably the least exciting to work on. Actually, come to
think of it, it may well be more bug fixing than anything else. SVG fonts is
probably too much for a 2nd year project, unless one of you has some experience
in that area, and we have someone that will be working on it soon. SVG as an
image is also probably not great project material for you, and since Robert
O'Callahan is planning to work on that, it's probably fairly well covered. ;-) I
guess that brings us back to SMIL. It's the most glamorous anyway, IMO. :-)

As you may know, Brian Britles, Daniel Holbert, Robert O'Callahan and others
have managed to get initial support for SMIL landed just recently. There's still
plenty of work (sub-features) to do though, and we'd like to get the support as
feature complete and bug free as possible before it's released in Firefox 3.2
(or whatever the release after 3.1 is). I've asked Brian and Daniel to comment
here with their own thoughts on all this, and perhaps give you some pointers.

BTW, feel free to email us privately, but it would be good to keep things in the
newsgroup, I think, since it makes sure everyone (including other parts of
Mozilla) stay in the loop, and also enables other potential contributors to
observe your experiences and perhaps be encouraged to get involved themselves.
Up to you of course. :-)

All the best,
Jonathan


On 1/20/09 9:40 PM, Eric Hedekar wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>     I've already briefly spoken with a few of you on the IRC channel, but it
> was mentioned that a mailing would probably drum up a few more ideas.  I'm
> one of three students in a group that's enrolled in a second-year
> programming course at Simon Fraser University; our course is an open source
> C++ systems programming course and we've been instructed to work on the
> mozilla codebase (this excites all of us).  After some intitial
> brainstorming and code/documentation reading, we've come to a consensus that
> we'd like to help with the SVG support in firefox.  What do you have to do
> with this?  Well, we're still in the project planning stage and we'd like to
> hear from you what sections of the code would fit well with a novice group
> like us and could benefit from a three-month development push on our part.
> Essentially we're looking for low-hanging fruit and a helpful hand as we
> venture into this codebase.  I can't speak for everyone in our group, but I
> certainly expect this to be the beginning of a long relationship with this
> code.
>     So, to recap, hello, it's nice to meet all of you, and what can a group
> of novices do to help?
> 
> -Eric Hedekar
>