Fall 2007 Weekly Schedule

Introduction

The fall is broken into two parts. First, open source and Mozilla specific skills and ideas are taught. Students learn how to deal with the tools, techniques, and practices of the Mozilla project and its community. Second, students are taught about Mozilla’s extensibility model, and how to write Firefox Addons and Extensions.

Part I – Essential Mozilla Development Skills and Concepts

Week 1 (Sept 3) Course introduction

• Course introduction
• Intro to open source
• Intro to Mozilla project
  • Mozilla Project Overview
  • Community, Foundation, Corporation
  • The Mozilla Manifesto
  • Mozilla platform and technologies

• Readings/Resources
  • "Cathedral and Bazaar" by Eric Raymond
  • "Revolution OS" [film] (see also http://www.revolution-os.com/ or QA 76.9.A25 R68 2003)
  • Mike Shaver discusses the Mozilla Manifesto [MP3]

• TODO
  • Create an account on this wiki for yourself
  • Create a personal wiki page on this wiki, and add a link for yourself to the People page
  • Create a blog (wordpress or blogspot or whatever) and create a feed category or tag called "open source"
  • Read the Blog Guidelines for instructions on how to use your blog in the course
  • Add your blog feed and info to the Open Source@Seneca Planet List so that it appears in the OpenSource@Seneca Planet
  • Register for FSOSS 2007 -- Note: volunteers can attend for free! (E-mail fsoss.volunteer.signup@senecac.on.ca from your Seneca e-mail account).

Week 2 (Sept 10) - Collaborative and Community Development Practices

• Collaborative development using on-line tools
• Intro to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
• Blogs and Planets
  • Planet Mozilla
  • OpenSource@Seneca Planet
• Using Wikis for Collaborative writing
  • Wikipedia and MediaWiki
  • Intro to course wiki
    • Guided Tour
    • "Yes, you can edit it!"
    • Common Editing tasks, History, Reverting changes
    • Watches, Recent Changes
    • Comparing selected versions (cf. diff)
    • Editing help
  • Wikis used by Mozilla
    • http://developer.mozilla.org (a.k.a., devmo, MDC)
    • http://wiki.mozilla.org (a.k.a., wmo or wiki.m.o)
• Project discussion

• Readings/Resources
• Mozilla Community (on-line lecture) by Mozilla's Mike Beltzner
• IRC Lab

• TODO
  • Complete all TODO items from Week 1
  • Blog about your reactions to "Cathedral and Bazaar" and "Revolution OS".
  • Comment in at least one other student's blog with your feedback to what they wrote
  • Create an account on MDC
  • Look at the Project List and Potential Projects pages and pick 3 projects on which you'd like to work--next week, you'll narrow this to just one. List them here along with your name so other students can see and groups can form.
  • Add your wiki page to the class list for your section: Students in DPS909 or Students in OSD600

Week 3 (Sept 17) - Managing and Building large source trees

• Revision Control Systems (RCS)
  • Introduction to RCS
  • cvs, svn, hg
  • Common concepts and tasks
    • Repository
    • Local Working Copy
    • RCS Changes (changesets) vs. Backups
    • Typical read-only activities: Checkout, Update, Log, Status
• Using Make to build software
  • Intro to Make
  • Mozilla has over 50,000 Makefiles
• Building Mozilla from Source
  • Building Mozilla for the first time

• Readings/Resources
  • Two simple makefile examples
  • How the Mozilla Build Works (on-line lecture) by Mozilla's J. Paul Reed
  • Release Builds: from source tree to exe (on-line lecture) by Mozilla's Robert Helmer

• TODO
  • Watch online lectures about the Mozilla build system.
  • Practice creating a simple makefile
  • Do a Debug Mozilla build on your home machine and blog about the experience
  • Finalize your project choice, form a group (if you are working in a group), and create a proper project page for your project in the Project List. See the full project instructions.

• NOTE
  • Thursday's class will be special, as we will have a guest speaker flying here to talk to you about the build. Please have your build done before Thursday so you can ask questions and understand what he's talking about.

Week 4 (Sept 24) - Navigating the Mozilla source tree

• Learning to be Lost Productively
  • Adding to Mozilla is not like writing a program from scratch
  • Leverage the existing code by reading, studying, and copying existing code
• Mozilla Source Code structure and style
  • Mozilla directory structure
  • Developer style guide
  • Portability Rules for C++
• Searching for Code
  • http://lxr.mozilla.org and http://mxr.mozilla.org
• How to Make Changes
  • building with client.mk in mozilla/ vs. incremental builds
  • Working with Patches
    • Creating a Patch

• Readings/Resources
  • Reading: Chapter 11 (pages 379-397) of Diomidis Spinellis, Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective, ISDN 0-201-79940-5 - online version

• TODO
  • Lab - Learning to use LXR/MXR effectively: Source Code Reading Lab
  • Practice doing incremental builds and applying patches
  • Lab - cvs diff and patch: Incremental Build Lab
  • Make a small change to some source code (more than just comments!) and prepare a patch file. Trade with someone else (via IRC + Pastebin) to exchange the patch. Rebuild with the patch. Blog about the experience.
  • Blog about your experiences.
  • Identify the main file(s) that your project will be changing and blog about your experience finding them and your observations about those files.