4.3 KiB
New contributors
This page is aimed at people who are new to Mozilla and want to contribute to Mozilla source code related to Marionette Python tests, WebDriver spec tests and related test harnesses and tools. Mozilla has both git and Mercurial repositories, but this guide only describes Mercurial.
If you run into issues or have doubts, check out the Resources section below and don't hesitate to ask questions. :) The goal of these steps is to make sure you have the basics of your development environment working. Once you do, we can get you started with working on an actual bug, yay!
Accounts, communication
-
Set up a Bugzilla account (and, if you like, a Mozillians profile). Please include your IRC nickname in both of these accounts so we can work with you more easily. For example, Eve Smith would set the Bugzilla name to "Eve Smith (:esmith)", where "esmith" is the IRC nick.
-
For a direct communication with us it will be beneficial to setup IRC. Make sure to also register your nickname as described in the linked document.
-
Join our #interop channel, and introduce yourself to the team. :ato, :AutomatedTester, :maja_zf, and :whimboo are all familiar with Marionette. We're nice, I promise, but we might not answer right away due to different time zones, time off, etc. So please be patient.
-
When you want to ask a question on IRC, just go ahead an ask it even if no one appears to be around/responding. Provide lots of detail so that we have a better chance of helping you. If you don't get an answer right away, check again in a few hours -- someone may have answered you in the mean time.
-
You can view IRC logs on logbot to check if anyone has answered your question while you were offline.
-
If you're having trouble reaching us over IRC, you are welcome to send an email to our mailing list instead. It's a good idea to include your IRC nick in your email message.
Getting the code, running tests
Follow the documentation on Contributing to get a sense of our projects, and which is of most interest for you. You will also learn how to get the Firefox source code, build your custom Firefox build, and how to run the tests.
Work on bugs and get code review
Once you are familiar with the code of the test harnesses, and the tests you might want to start with your first contribution. The necessary steps to submit and verify your patches are layed out in Patches.md.
Resources
-
Search Mozilla's code repositories with searchfox.
-
Another guide for new contributors. It has not been updated in a long time but it's a good general resource if you ever get stuck on something. The most relevant sections to you are about Bugzilla, Mercurial, Python and the Development Process.
-
More general resources are available in this little guide :maja_zf wrote in 2015 to help a student get started with open source contributions.
-
Textbook about general open source practices: Practical Open Source Software Exploration
-
If you'd rather use git instead of hg, see git workflow for Gecko development and/or this blog post by :ato.