Re: [Bug-gnuzilla] Icecat maintainer position questions

[Loic J. Duros]

On 02/04/2013 04:27 PM, Zach Wick wrote:

On 02/04/2013 03:56 PM, Loic J. Duros wrote:

Hi Zach:

Thanks for posting!

On 02/04/2013 03:40 PM, Zach Wick wrote:

As a long time user of Icecat, I was surprised to see that the project
is currently looking for a maintainer. Before I volunteer for that
position (assuming that the call is still open)

I'm currently the IceCat maintainer. However we are actively searching
for contributors/developers to work on the project. And your long-term
participation would be welcomed!

Thanks for the heads up Loic! I would be very interested in contributing
to this project.

Great! Welcome aboard!

, I would like to know
what is/are the duty/expectations of that position? I would assume that
the main duty is the pull the upstream Mozilla code changes and apply
them the the Icecat codebase, then package up the resulting new version
of Icecat for the various main platforms.

Currently we are using BZR (with the handy bzr import method for the
upstream tarball and bzr merge) to do that, then we look at (some of)
the changes introduced by the latest version and merge it into IceCat.
But that's only a very small part of what IceCat is aiming at. In
fact, this is only a side issue to IceCat, as keeping up to date with
the Firefox versions is not the priority. The priorities are: 1)
Freedom 2) Privacy. Most of my time as a developer are dedicated to
working on extensions to enhance privacy (an upcoming extension) and
freedom (with extensions such as LibreJS.)

Would you like to help and work on such new projects that harness the
Firefox extension development API (XPCOM, ...) to enhance freedom and
privacy? If so, I have a big list of "things to do".

So is the place that development happens (ie. the repo and bug tracker)
Savannah or Launchpad?

Most of the development happens on Savannah. I don't even have access to the Launchpad.
Marco Simonelli, last time he updated the list, said he was close to releasing the latest version as a deb package there.
You can see with him to take over this part, as he seems too busy currently. If you could, it would be great!

I had seen the "Project Maintainer Wanted" posting on Savannah and the
GNU site, but it seems that all relevant project information is spread
out between the three of Savannah, Launchpad, and the GNU.org page.

Savannah is where it happens. It's difficult to give access to Savannah without giving full commit access there. So usually what I like to ask is for someone to submit a patch or two before I grant write access. Thanks!

Loic



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http://gnuzilla.gnu.org

So what should be my first steps towards becoming a contributor? I
pulled the code yesterday and started digging through it. I assume that
you have this "big list of 'things to do'" posted somewhere - I would
love to start taking on some low-hanging fruit!

The list I'm talking about is mostly emails sent to me personally by RMS. So it's not posted somewhere yet. However I'll look at the most top priority ones that are needed for extension development and let you know about them  in a separate email.

Thanks,

Loic

-Zach

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http://gnuzilla.gnu.org