*Poof*

It sure has been a while.

This will probably be the last post regarding the course, assuming I pass that is, so I better make it worthwhile. Before I start bragging about my über cool bug, I’d like to say I really appreciated the pretzels. Thank you.

Bug 237376:

I know my bug didn’t involve a lot of coding, and I know it was simpler than most of the others. But then again this course was about the experience and not about the complexity of the code. I have Human Computer Interaction for that and let’s hope I finish it in time.

What was required of me, was to place “Reply to Newsgroup” before “Reply to Sender Only” when right clicked on a newsgroup message. So what I did first was actually join a newsgroup so I could be able to reproduce the bug. That just sounds sick if you ask me.

Please feel free to pick the definition of a newsgroup that you're most comfortable with from here.

It was obvious that I wouldn’t be writing something new, but reordering lines instead. So after spending some quality time with “http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/” I found the file responsible for the ordering of the items in the lists, named: “mailWindowOverlay.xul”, present in “comm-central\mail\base\content”.

The part of the file that was of interest was:

< id="mailContext-replySender" label="&contextReplySender.label;" accesskey="&contextReplySender.accesskey;" oncommand="MsgReplySender(event);">

< id="mailContext-replyNewsgroup" label="&contextReplyNewsgroup.label;" accesskey="&contextReplyNewsgroup.accesskey;" oncommand="MsgReplyGroup(event);">

After I reordered those and placed newsgroup before sender, it worked like a charm, and right clicking on a newsgroup message now looked like this:


Basically that was what I was required to do. Yet having “Reply to Newsgroup” before “Reply to Sender Only” only while right clicking the message, and have the old order in the main message list, didn’t feel quite right. So I decided I’d change the order there too. Luckily it was the same file, but under:

< !-- Message -->

And once again, the part that needed reordering was:

< id="replySenderMainMenu" label="&replySenderCmd.label;" accesskey="&replySenderCmd.accesskey;" command="cmd_replySender">
< id="replyNewsgroupMainMenu" label="&replyNewsgroupCmd.label;" accesskey="&replyNewsgroupCmd.accesskey;" key="key_reply" command="cmd_replyGroup">

After that, clicking on the main message tab looked like this:


And it was then that I decided I’d call it a night, generate a patch, submit it, and wait for a review. So I did. And to my surprise not, something was wrong, I got a reply saying that “the patch does not apply” and that I should generate it using “hg diff”. Now you see, the main problem is that I did generate it using hg diff, so I’m kind of clueless on what I should do now. Apparently, I also used tabs instead of spaces, so I fixed that too, rebuilt, and yes, Thunderbird refused to run on my machine although it compiled without any problems. So, I phoned Majid, and asked him to run it on his. It worked. Ironic, isn’t it? So I had him generate the patch and mail it to me, I uploaded it again, and I’m currently waiting on a second reply.


So that was pretty much it, come to think of it, this won't be my last post, so I'm gonna cut this short, and update you people once I get my bug reviewed.


It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Toodles!