I'll be working on Bespin for Mozilla and have requested to be assigned a few bugs I found on Bugzilla. I have requested to contribute to issue 516852, about how the scrollbar cursor doesn't change to the correct cursor when it's over the custom scrollbars in the editor, and issue 521823 about how commented code doesn't display as being 'greyed-out' when the cursor is near the bottom of the file, but becomes greyed out once you move the cursor to the top of the comment block. I chose to work on these two issues because I thought it would give me an introduction to the Bespin code, give me some access to the code, and begin my understanding of the inner-workings of Bespin. Unfortunately, I was denied working on issue 521823, due to the fact that 'it's unclear to me(Kevin Dangoor) when we will bring the debugging functionality back. There are significantly more important things on our plate than that...'. That is unfortunate because I was looking forward to working on it a lot, but that will have to wait. It also appears that bug 516852 has already been resolved so that is also out of the picture. My latest and hopefully final bug for this iteration is bug number 542578. Apparently, adding new lines to the buffer causes a one pixel wide line in the color of the selection to appear on the left side of the editor view.
UPDATE: I just found out late last night that the bug in question...542578...is also a thing of the past and have been blessed, finally, with a bug that needs to currently needs to be fixed. This bug is bug number 540112 about how the Bespin cursor doesn't blink when it's inside the text editing area. Well, I'm going to fix that right now.
Background
Bespin is an online IDE developed by Mozilla Labs. It allows users to create and edit code, similar to Microsoft Visual Studio, from within a web-browser with no client-side installation necessary. It will allow multiple users to work on and discuss a single piece of code/program collaboratively. It is also a piece of open-source software...a very attractive option to developers everywhere.
Progress Tracking
I will be tracking this progress on my wiki. I will also post things that other developers would find important on the issue page (540112). They will be able to follow me through my wiki and through my posts on the issue pages listed above. I expect to have looked at the code for these issues by February 19th and to have issue 540112 finished by February 20th. Yes, there's not a lot of time but this bug is due the week of February 15th and according to all logic, Saturday is still a part of the week. Sometimes you run into obstacles and you just need to kick them down and run over them a few times, and that is what I plan on doing. This little setback of my original bug not really being a bug anymore will not keep me down.
Different Versions of Each Release
As stated previously, I don't have long to do it so I'm going to tackle it head on. It shouldn't be too big anyway, at least I hope not. For issue 540112, I plan on it being done for February 20th. I will then continue to work on more bugs to help out the mozilla community. I will discuss my issues with Julian Viereck for assistance and guidance with the issue. He has already been a big help in guiding me to it's general location and giving me a truly current bug.
Overall
I will be using JavaScript since that is what the majority of files in Bespin are coded in. It has been a little while since I've used it but I reviewed it while working on the last fail of a bug, so it's coming back to me. I was talking to Julian Viereck on irc about the issue and he said it was still open and needed to be resolved. I will use Google for help with syntax as well as clarify my questions about the issue with Julian Viereck. I've already experienced a few barriers, namely the bug I was working on previously and spent a good amount of time on was obsolete, but I am sure to experience new barriers as time progresses. I will be talking to people over irc and learn on my own using google to overcome barriers. We shall see how it works in the end. I think it'll be good to look around in bespin some more but understanding it all is pretty impossible since it's a massive repository.
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