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Contributing to Chromium: An Illustrated Guide

145 points by DanielRibeiro 12y ago

yosheeck 12y ago
Debugging with printfs, using grep... Good old-school stuff.
sanjiwatsuki 12y ago
This is a pretty good guide to getting started on contributing to Chromium. I was an external contributor for Chromium for 2 years and it took me a while to figure out some of the procedures and best practices, like building the Release build instead of Debug or changing my GYP defines to using SHARED_LIBRARY -- those tweaks will literally save double digit minutes even on machines with very beefy CPUs. The only other thing I can think of that I would add to this guide would be to search for "Hotlist:GoodFirstBug" in the issue tracker when trying to get started. Not every bug there is actually easy for a first-timer on the project to tackle, but you can normally find something to dive into and try to fix, even without much knowledge of the codebase. I overall had a great experience with the project and it really helped me grow as a stronger developer early in my career.
wldcordeiro 12y ago
I dig this, it'd be cool to see a similar post for Firefox and other Browsers that are open source.
- mconley 12y ago
  You might enjoy http://codefirefox.com/ http://codefirefox.com/.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  Mozilla has pretty good documentation for new contributors: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g... Code Firefox, a series of videos demonstrating how to download the code and build it (which, btw, takes less than ten minutes for a full clean build on my three-year-old MacBook Pro :) http://codefirefox.org/ http://codefirefox.org/ Bugs Ahoy!, a Bugzilla search engine for "good first bugs" with a mentor's contact information, filtered by programming language or feature area matching your interests: https://wiki.mozilla.org/BugsAhoy https://wiki.mozilla.org/BugsAhoy There are also friendly Mozilla developers on the #introduction IRC channel on Mozilla's IRC server ready to answer new contributors' questions.
- notwaldorf 12y ago
  Josh Matthews has a neat choose-your-own-adventure tutorial for Firefox: http://www.joshmatthews.net/trainingmontage/ http://www.joshmatthews.net/trainingmontage/
brainpan 12y ago
first sentence: "I gave a talk about how to get started contributing to Chromium, but ... my slides by themselves look like cold-medicine induced hallucinations (which, to be fair, they were)." Is she serious? Hardcore. That stuff will "make pure LSD seem like Ginger Beer..."
sidcool 12y ago
The links start getting on LSD when hovered upon. Found it funny :) But a good start point. Thanks for sharing.
di 12y ago
Anyone know what she's using to build her presentations? I poked around but couldn't figure it out. More here: https://speakerdeck.com/notwaldorf https://speakerdeck.com/notwaldorf
- notwaldorf 12y ago
  Plain old Keynote :)
  - di 12y ago
    Ah, thanks Monica. They're beautiful!
  - breandr 12y ago
    Hello, this is certainly off-topic but I am curious about your username. Is it in reference to Waldorf schools? My daughter just started preschool at one and I'm wondering if "notwaldorf" is a shot at Waldorf schools. As a parent I would obviously love to know about any negative experiences.
buro9 12y ago
I cannot believe that no-one has registered https://canihaveapony.com/ https://canihaveapony.com/
fakedrake 12y ago
Great article! thank you. Shame you do printfs though, it looks like you guys have done some pretty awesome work with putting GDB on steroids: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxDebugging#GDB https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxDebugging#GDB

145 points by DanielRibeiro 12y ago

Debugging with printfs, using grep... Good old-school stuff.

This is a pretty good guide to getting started on contributing to Chromium. I was an external contributor for Chromium for 2 years and it took me a while to figure out some of the procedures and best practices, like building the Release build instead of Debug or changing my GYP defines to using SHARED_LIBRARY -- those tweaks will literally save double digit minutes even on machines with very beefy CPUs. The only other thing I can think of that I would add to this guide would be to search for "Hotlist:GoodFirstBug" in the issue tracker when trying to get started. Not every bug there is actually easy for a first-timer on the project to tackle, but you can normally find something to dive into and try to fix, even without much knowledge of the codebase. I overall had a great experience with the project and it really helped me grow as a stronger developer early in my career.

wldcordeiro 12y ago

I dig this, it'd be cool to see a similar post for Firefox and other Browsers that are open source.

mconley 12y ago
You might enjoy http://codefirefox.com/ http://codefirefox.com/.
cpeterso 12y ago
Mozilla has pretty good documentation for new contributors: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g... Code Firefox, a series of videos demonstrating how to download the code and build it (which, btw, takes less than ten minutes for a full clean build on my three-year-old MacBook Pro :) http://codefirefox.org/ http://codefirefox.org/ Bugs Ahoy!, a Bugzilla search engine for "good first bugs" with a mentor's contact information, filtered by programming language or feature area matching your interests: https://wiki.mozilla.org/BugsAhoy https://wiki.mozilla.org/BugsAhoy There are also friendly Mozilla developers on the #introduction IRC channel on Mozilla's IRC server ready to answer new contributors' questions.
notwaldorf 12y ago
Josh Matthews has a neat choose-your-own-adventure tutorial for Firefox: http://www.joshmatthews.net/trainingmontage/ http://www.joshmatthews.net/trainingmontage/

brainpan 12y ago

first sentence: "I gave a talk about how to get started contributing to Chromium, but ... my slides by themselves look like cold-medicine induced hallucinations (which, to be fair, they were)." Is she serious? Hardcore. That stuff will "make pure LSD seem like Ginger Beer..."

sidcool 12y ago

The links start getting on LSD when hovered upon. Found it funny :) But a good start point. Thanks for sharing.

di 12y ago

Anyone know what she's using to build her presentations? I poked around but couldn't figure it out. More here: https://speakerdeck.com/notwaldorf https://speakerdeck.com/notwaldorf

notwaldorf 12y ago
Plain old Keynote :)
- di 12y ago
  Ah, thanks Monica. They're beautiful!
- breandr 12y ago
  Hello, this is certainly off-topic but I am curious about your username. Is it in reference to Waldorf schools? My daughter just started preschool at one and I'm wondering if "notwaldorf" is a shot at Waldorf schools. As a parent I would obviously love to know about any negative experiences.

buro9 12y ago

I cannot believe that no-one has registered https://canihaveapony.com/ https://canihaveapony.com/

fakedrake 12y ago

Great article! thank you. Shame you do printfs though, it looks like you guys have done some pretty awesome work with putting GDB on steroids: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxDebugging#GDB https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxDebugging#GDB