November Bug Squash Month: GJS

Here’s what happened during November Bug Squash Month in GJS.

First off, I didn’t really get on the ball to promote Bug Squash Month and I didn’t take pictures of any bug squashing activity… which I regret. I hope this post can make up for some of that.

During November I finally took the leap and offered to become a maintainer of GJS. My employer Endless has been sponsoring work on bugs 742249 and 751252, porting GJS’s Javascript engine from SpiderMonkey 24 to SpiderMonkey 31. But aside from that I had been getting interested in contributing more to it, and outside of work I did a bunch of maintenance work modernizing the Autotools scripts and getting it to compile without warnings. From there it was a small step to officially volunteering.

With not much of November remaining and a holiday and family visit coming up (life always is more important than bug squashing!) I decided to start out my bug-squashing campaign with what would get me the most results for the time spent: going through GJS’s bug tracker and closing obsolete or invalid bugs. This I managed to do, closing about 1/4 of all open bugs!

Then I made a list of all open bugs with attached patches and intended to review them to see if they still applied and why they hadn’t been committed yet. I got through a few, and had the dubious distinction of fixing up and committing patches from a 7 year old bug yesterday. But as you can see in the list, there are still 54 remaining. A good to-do list for the next Bug Squash Month, or whenever I feel like working on GJS but don’t know what to work on!

Did you know Bugzilla could generate graphs? I didn’t! Here’s a graph of the total bug count in GJS during November Bug Squash Month:

The clunkiness of this chart kills me though…

My plans now that Bug Squash Month is over are to concentrate on fixing things that make it more pleasant to use and contribute to GJS:

• Find an active co-maintainer so that we can review each other’s patches (could this be you?)
• Make ES6 Promises available (this work is also being sponsored by Endless)
• Rework the test suite to use an embedded copy of Jasmine so that writing automated tests becomes less of a pain
• Find ways to bring in some of the conveniences that Node developers are used to

I’ve also decided to try an experiment: I’ve just made the Trello board public on which I keep track of what I’m working on and what I’d like to work on. Let me know if this is interesting to you and what features you might like to see on there! (It’s made possible by a Chrome extension, Bug 2 Trello.)

All in all November Bug Squash Month was a success, though next time I will get started earlier in the month. Come join me next time!