Well, on this my 50th post, I am excited to announce that I have been offered a summer internship with Mozilla.

I’m just waiting for the actual paperwork to set the wheels in motion. This is going to be one heck of a ride. I’m kind of hoping that once I get this Windows source server up and running, it might be possible to do some hacking on gdb and learn how to get it doing the same thing. Then anyone could debug mozilla without having to build!

When I first became involved with the Open Source class and Mozilla I never would have imagined that I would become involved at this level of the code, but I wouldn’t trade the learning I have undergone for anything.

Talking with Ted the other day about the pdbstr.exe replacement and how it will be written in C++. I’m super rusty on my C++ so that will be challenging. I wonder how the pdb files are written to and read from? This will be the focus of my next week’s work while I await feedback on the bugfixes that I’ve started. Everyone’s busy locking down Firefox 3, so I may have to wait a bit.

That’s me, cleaning up the symbolstore.py patch one little scrap of python at a time.

Today’s lesson was a brief introduction to String Interpolation.

In the bug, Ted had mentioned using string interpolation as one of the ways I could shrink down how many times I was writing to file. There are a couple of ways to do this, and apparently the best way, when there is only one variable to replace, is to do %s in the string and then a % variableName at the end of the string. Once I had done this however, ‘make buidsymbols’ was complaining that a float argument was required.

As it turns out, there are many places in the stream I am writing where % is followed by another character, and the first is a %f…so it was never getting to my %s way down the line. This is because Source Server does string interpolation as well and so I guess that means that I can’t use the python string interpolation after all.

Unless someone has dealt with this before and has any brilliant ideas to share.

I’ve spoken with Ted on IRC and he will be looking at my revisions this week when ff3 beta freezes (man, they must be pulling out hair out in california) and so I’m looking forward to taking the next step. We spoke briefly tonight about the pdbstr.exe replacement. I wasn’t sure what it should look like. Does it have to be a windows binary? Apparently, yes. That means some C++. Woot.