New developers looking for a place to join in
Eric Hedekar
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
--
_______________________________________
http://greyrockstudio.blogspot.com
codedread
This sounds great! I think you should contact:
Jonathan Watt (jwatt): http://jwatt.org/moz/svg/help-out/
Other names: Robert Longson, Daniel Holbert, Robert O'Callahan and
Brian Birtles.
Good luck and keep posting here!
Regards,
Jeff
Jonathan Watt
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
Brian Birtles
> 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.
Hi!
Yes, some help on SMIL would be great! You can get an idea of what
features still need to be implemented at: http://brian.sol1.net/svg/status.php
However, I would strongly recommend looking at animateMotion if you're
interested in SMIL. It should be quite self-contained and is very
"glamorous"! Also, you can look at the implementation of
animateTransform and get some ideas from there. There'd be enough
matrix maths to keep it interesting from a university project point of
view too and all the code for parsing path syntax and calculating path
lengths should be already available in Mozilla's SVG implementation.
It's a pretty big job but could be fun!
As for the other features:
* syncbase timing (or anything timing-related) -- although this is a
really big and important feature it needs a really good understanding
of SMIL which is hard to get quickly, you really have to go through
three different versions of the spec (SMIL Animation, SVG 1.1 chapters
11,5,16,F, and occasionally SMIL3) with a fine-toothed comb.
* integration with SVG types -- really important too but needs a good
understanding of the SVG codebase. Basically doing what has been done
for SVGLength2
* integration with CSS -- again, need to understand the Moz CSS code
(which I definitely don't) and I think this is already being taken
care of by others
* animateColor -- depends on integration with CSS
* xlink:href -- possible? Probably too small a feature although it
needs significant testing. Certainly not very glamorous either.
They're my initial thoughts. Looking forward to your contribution
wherever you decide to help!
Brian
codedread
> However, I would strongly recommend looking at animateMotion if you're
> interested in SMIL
> * integration with CSS -- again, need to understand the Moz CSS code
> (which I definitely don't) and I think this is already being taken
> care of by others
I'm an outside observer, but for what it's worth, "animateMotion" and
"integrating with CSS" are my top two choices for SVG+SMIL in Mozilla
if I have to pick :)
Jeff
Eric Hedekar
I just wanted to give an update on our group's decision. We've gladly taken
Brian's advice and are digging into the animateMotion implementation. We've
had one member of our group drop out, but Dickson Wong and I are charging
ahead un-phased. I'm planning to publish, under the GNU FDL, all my course
work (writeups etc...) but I need to check with the instructor of the class
to see what caveats there may be to that... Also, despite this being an
academic project, I am of the firm mind that the strength of open source
projects comes from collaboration, so if anyone knows any essential tidbits
that Dickson and I might have overlooked while we read about SMIL etc...
please don't hesitate to point us in the right direction. It'd also be
great to hear some critiques of our project plans etc... once they're
uploaded to a server (provided the prof has no objections). I was wondering
if we should mark bug #436418 as assigned to us, or if we've yet to earn
enough respect to take over bugs like that? Thanks again for your warm
welcomes, and I look forward to helping the code grow into 3.2, oh and if
you see us in IRC, feel free to wave (my nick is _stochastic_ and Dickson's
is diwo).
-Eric Hedekar
--
_______________________________________
http://greyrockstudio.blogspot.com
Daniel Holbert
> if we should mark bug #436418 as assigned to us, or if we've yet to earn
> enough respect to take over bugs like that?
Go for it! Good luck :) I can hopefully help out, if you get stuck --
I'm "dholbert" on IRC.
Thanks!
~Daniel
Jonathan Watt
> I just wanted to give an update on our group's decision. We've gladly taken
> Brian's advice and are digging into the animateMotion implementation. We've
> had one member of our group drop out, but Dickson Wong and I are charging
> ahead un-phased. I'm planning to publish, under the GNU FDL, all my course
> work (writeups etc...) but I need to check with the instructor of the class
> to see what caveats there may be to that... Also, despite this being an
> academic project, I am of the firm mind that the strength of open source
> projects comes from collaboration, so if anyone knows any essential tidbits
> that Dickson and I might have overlooked while we read about SMIL etc...
> please don't hesitate to point us in the right direction.
Thanks for the update. It's hard to know what you might have overlooked without
knowing where you're currently at, but continued updates here or in the bug
would allow us to help there. :-)