Notes on Chrome and Open Source Development

So I recently became an author of Chromium. I fixed a very minor bug, one that’s sort of overshadowed by a larger one. I’ll get back to the specifics, but I’d like to first say, what a fun experience. Chromium is definitely the largest project I’ve ever contributed to, mostly because I’ve avoided it. Learning the process, getting acclimated to a huge code base; these are things I’ve needlessly feared. Yes there’s things to learn, and yes, finding the location of your bug in the code is like sailing for buried treasure when your map only has the names of the islands. But it is a treasure hunt that comes with both satisfaction and rewards.

I would say the most difficult part about getting involved is the mechanics of managing the source. Obviously—it’s huge. It takes the better part of an hour to download the git repository, if not more. The first compile takes just as long and each one thereafter is nothing to scoff at, especially if you’re accustomed to the browser-refresh build time of web development. That said, there’s some pretty neat tools the Chromium developers have to manage it. I was most impressed by bisect-builds. Think git bisect, but if git were to serve you revisions to try like an attentive waiter serves courses. Like git proper, it chooses the revisions and helps you narrow down to the one introducing the bug, but it also seamlessly manages downloading and preparing built versions of Chromium, in the background, so you won’t even need to wait in many cases. All it needs is a good sommelier plugin.

In the abstract, the review and commit process had me spooked too. I could just imagine some snippy programmer getting on me for curly braces in the wrong spot or for not saying the right thing in a commit message. Yes, style is important, especially in such a big project, and yes, style guides can err toward the ridiculous, but no, it’s not something serious to worry about. I didn’t end up doing anything that would likely get me into trouble, but even if I had, that’s the reason these processes are in place. The key here is patience. With a project like Chromium, there’s tons of developers employed to work on the project and they tend to be helpful because they know the process can be daunting to newcomers. They, after all, were newcomers at one point and they probably made more mistakes than they’d care to tell you.

Now to the actual code. My biggest impression here is organization. There was lots of it. Not all of it made sense to me, but there it was. Everything goes in src. WebKit goes in third_party. HTMLSelectElement goes in html. It’s great that there’s some system in place, but it was pretty much completely useless to me. The bugs I grappled with had to do with click events not firing for select elements, but only on the Mac. I traipsed through directory after directory, breaking things just to get stack traces, doing anything I could to leave some semblance of a breadcrumb trail. This is the biggest epitaph that ever could be for Code Search. Google notes that, “Much of Code Search’s functionality is available at Google Code Hosting including search for Chromium,” so I got to use what’s left of it working on these bugs, but for other large projects, similar tasks must be horrendous. You’d think the company that tasked itself with “organizing the world’s information” would see it vital to organize the information we use to organize information. (Yo dawg…)

As for the bug itself, if you take a look, you’ll find an interesting example of ways cross-platform applications interact with specific platforms. Mac users, did you ever notice that the little menu that pops up with select boxes is the same in most programs? That’s because even programs not mainly written in native Cocoa can still call out to it so they can provide a native-appearing interface. Such complexity can result in hiccups like onmouseup events not firing for select elements, because by the time the mouse button is released, the cursor is no longer in the purview of the select, but an NSMenu offered by the OS. The problem was solved in WebKit2 by firing a fake event, tricking the select into thinking its click was finished, but the fix never made it into the regular WebKit source used by Chromium. I haven’t quite figured out how to patch that up just yet, but the commit I did make fixed a related issue Chrome itself had on the about:flags page. Presumably this isn’t the only place seeing the problem; you can see it for yourself here.

I plan to keep working on that bug. If you, dear reader, write the patch before me, more power to you, there’s over 30,000 open bugs. (At the time of this writing—let’s get cracking!) It really was a lot of fun, and if you need any help getting started, there’s a [bunch of resources][9], a helpful Chromium team, and definitely feel free to shout out to me and I’ll do my best to give you a hand or help find someone who can.

[9]: http://www.chromium.org/developers