MozCampAsia2012/Schedule/GrowMozilla/Improving developer engagement through mach and a better build system
Title of Session: Improving developer engagement through mach and a better build system
Facilitator(s): Gregory Szorc
Are you paid or volunteer staff?: paid
Area of Contribution (Team Name): Build Peer. Developer tools advocate.
How are you currently involved with the community?: Limited to IRC and email interactions, sadly. I would like to expand my interaction with the community at this Mozcamp.
Location of Work (where do you reside?): San Francisco, California, USA
Talk Length: Actual talking could be done in less than 30 minutes. I would love a dedicated hackathon. 90+ minutes of that would be awesome.
Summary:
The experience of contributing to mozilla-central can be daunting. Build instructions are complex and fragmented. There are a long list of steps one must take to configure your system, build the tree, and submit patches. A lot of these rely on learned knowledge that comes only with time invested in The Project.
The poor experiences have frustrated me since the first day I became involved with Mozilla. I have contributed improvements to the build system itself and the tools surrounding it to make it much less frustrating.
The goal of this talk is to give a brief summary of where we are and more importantly where we are going. I will spend a lot of time talking about mach (our generic command-line tool to foster easier development) and how people can leverage it to be more productive. I hope to include a hacking session at the end where interested parties can get together and crank out useful mach features and other enhancements to the build system.
How your session furthers the MozCamp Goals:
The talk is relevant to all tracks.
Expected Outcome or Deliverable:
The talk and subject matter focus on an area that not many people pay attention to (the build system and related tools). I hope this spotlight will highly an area of The Project where we need significant help and will facilitate more community involvement.
Desired Audience Type or Skill-set:
Anybody who builds or interacts with the main mozilla-central code repository or derivatives thereof (including Firefox OS). For hacking, Python skills are arguably required.
Equipment Needs (Video projector already included): None
To Be Completed by the Audience-
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