Thunderbird Bug

I miss not being able to compile thunderbird.

Seriously.

So hello,
I'm working on the thunderbird bug where all I have to do was put an overlay when you recieve an email. Except like, well, overlays aren't supported yet in the Mozilla build, so I found out I suddenly need to work on thunderbird API, YES!

So seriously, first off I want to thank the Mozilla community, they are as helpful as a student explaining answers to you under the table during a final exam, dedicating their own time to help us out. I'll one day repay a n00b on an irc channel, although not IT related. Sorry.

So seriously seriously, a quick walkthrough of my progress
1. Tried to compile for two days
2. Compiled!
3. Looked at source code.
4. Looked at source code.
5. Got overlays working in a standalone application.
6. Looked at source code.
7. Went onto irc, had a long chat, figured out its harder then it should be, started comparing files to find out what an idl is, and such.
8. Looked at source code.
9. Refreshed source code.
10. Looked at sdk.
11. Looked at source code.
12. Went back on irc at 5am and got a better and clearer idea on what to do.
13. MADE A IDL FILE.
14. HACKED A SOURCE FILE!
15. Got compile errors.
16. Changed some stuff.
17. Got rid of compile errors.
18. Implemented imgIContainers.
19. Compiled. Failed.
20. Tried to fix.
21. Errors.
21. IRC while compiling and fixing.
22. FAIL.
23. Blogging about my progress.

ps. I'm nearly done with the api bug, once i finish with why imgIContainer screws up another file instead all thats left is to turn it into a HIcon and then thats it! It should work!

Then I have to figure out how to see if just because it compiles it works, but yeah, three weeks is quite a load.

Thunderbird part 3

Finally got it to compile, problem turned out to be that the trunk (the source available via mercurial) contained the problem and it wasn't my computer related.

So yeah, follow the steps now and it works, should have just done this two days late, would have worked perfect.

So anyways progress on the bug itself is going slow but going. So far I managed to split it into two parts, the first creating an independent program that should be capable of showing jumplists and creating actions efficiently, as well as scouring around the source code (planning to do that on ubuntu, don't know why) for a few classes that are will be required to link thunderbird to the taskbar (Currently on this milestone).

The second part is actually implementing the linking and debugging the hell out of it. Not that it should be too hard to keep a low amount of bugs in such a fix but comming from someone who spent over two days trying to compile something... =D

I'm kind of freaked out by having to finally do something that counts in the cs world, somehow the concept of a opensource program used by a ton of people (even I installed it on clients machines during internships) seems like something; specially compared to the code we been producing at uni that mainly threw time efficiency and any effective coding ethics clean out the window and worked mainly just to work. So here goes luck and all, wish me luck!

Would also like to thank fellow classmates for their effort to help as well as the open source community (irc is uber cool) for the time they give to total noobs :D.

Thunderbird continuation

Thunderbird still dosn't want to build.
I downloaded the sdk, refreshed all the steps available and the code still stops at this line,



The only thing I can think of left is that its not happy with studio 2008 team development but then again it should have given me an error earlier on in the compliling process, this error occurs after a while.

In case your wondering I tried several different configuraton files as well, including all the ones upon the mozilla simple thunderbird site, on various how to build on windows blogs and from the gosc website.

Help? Anyone? =D

THUNDERBIRD Building and Bug

I honestly don't have much to blog about now, except that building on windows is not as fun as one would think. First you download a terminal emulator in order to be able to checkout the source, which works so *check*. Then you build and it works for over an hour, and then returns an error. Says a configuration file is not found within the /etc/fstab.conf. So I look around and all thats mentioned is that I required the windows sdk to build against, which is 1.4GB. Sigh. This compared to linux one-two-three steps is annoying. And the reason I'm building in windows is because my project involves the windows seven taskbar lists, which is that really cool feature where you get to right click on a program icon on the taskbar (which may or may not be open) and give you a personalized list with application specific data. In the case of thunderbird maybe a few pinned favourite people you would want to email, the latest 5 emails in your inbox and a notification system (I personally find flashing to be simple but very efficient). Anyway expect another update in five hours once the windows sdk downloads.

Peace Out.