What about contributing to the SeaMonkey Project⁉

2017-12-20 by rrbd 8 Comments

Hello,

Participation of the active developers at bugfixes August … November

Assignee / Component

it’s not a secret that SeaMonkey-development is understaffed. At the right you see 2 statistic charts:

Totally 20 bugfixes / month, that is much better than (for example) at the AOo project with only 5 bugfixes each month, but much worse than in the LibreOffice project with: 545 bugfixes within 1/4 year — and see the colorful “pie“. Of course a pointless comparison, but it demonstrates the critical situation for the SeaMonkey project with very few developers.

But may be there are people with basic (or even good) bug fixing skills, who only shied from the many obstacles before they can start? Some of them can be surmounted easil:

• Systematic review of UNCONFIRMED Bug Reports to get familiar with the project and the problems which need a solution
•  read and basic understanding of  <https://wiki.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey/FAQ#How_To_Start_Contributing_Code>

But the next steps are much more difficult:

• Install Mercurial, do some first steps
  Thinking about this until now my inner temptation became too strong, though there are lots of [good first bug] bugs, which should not need too much knowledge to fix them. And it would be not big, but visible progress if me and others could fix some of the bugs I find immediately. But for reaching this goal we would need a team of beginners who help each other to overcome obstacles which will appear during the beginning phase. We could start with some bugs in SeaMonkey Help and dare more demanding challenges step by step.
• Do some first fixes
• upload them for review
• …

I think interested volunteers should fix a weekend with some kind of time table where they do these first steps together, help each other, might even get help of a mentor form the SeaMonkey Developers Team … .

May be we even can get some external volunteers from Hackerearth, CodeChef, TopCoder,Codeforces,HackerRank or similar communities (may be you know a better community were we can try to recruit volunteers?)? Or, if we are lucky, some “self compiling users” are willing to provide their knowledge to the SeaMonkey project?

If you have some own thoughts, please add a comment as reply to one of the threads:

• “… – I am interested in participating”
  (only a short comment, 1 … 2 sentences concerning your background, no discussion)
• “… – No, thanks”
  (only a short comment concerning your reasons, no discussion)
  or
• “… general discussion”
  (Ideas, criticism, anything else …)