0.8 Release

0.8 release gave me more workplace skills than coding skills. In this release, I have done the least coding for all of my releases till date. In place of coding, I understand the major concept of open source community.

I am a student and select a bug from the list generated by the professor. But, How do people voluntarily takes up initiative in a bug and fix it? I found that individual doesn't decide the bug and whom it is assigned but the community decides that. What happened to me is I interviewed Bryan Clark, the User Experience Developer, at Mozilla Messaging for one of course in the school. During the talk, I got impress by the kind of work he does. I felt like, I want to do that. Meanwhile, I was not having any bugs to fix and was looking for one. I told him that I am looking for a bug and he urgently replied me that he needs some help with what he is doing. Instantly, I got agreed on whatever kind of bug he wanted me to work on. He sent me the link of the bug. I got it approved from David. Eventually, I ended up doing the bug. The moral of the story is that community members do not go in bugzilla and look for the bugs that interest them. But, they got some reference from other community member for bugs and they fix them. The incident gave me the confidence that I can work on my own.

The bug that I got is "tango icons for message compose window" . In this bug, I have to apply the patch created by a person, Andreas Nilsson, contracted by Thunderbird for a period. Thunderbird people felt that it is very unnecessary to teach Andreas how the hg mercurial works. So tohughtful of them! So, Andreas just creates the regular patches for the file and I have to apply those patches, add images in the hg and submit the exceptable patches.

Finally, I have made the patch and submit the patch. Let's see, if I have understood it correctly.