I casually contribute to Firefox and it's not ridiculously hard. It is a somewhat steep learning curve if you contribute for the first time, primarily getting acquainted to the build system, the area of the code you're fixing, and then finding the right people to nag about reviews, but it is far from ridiculously hard.
It used to be ridiculously hard, back in the days of hq merge queues or even cvs, I give you that, but the general build stuff improved a lot since then.
The build system is hg clone/git clone + ./mach bootstrap + ./mach build... And there is a lot of docs for it too. I wouldn't call that "borderline insane".
Submitting a patch for review is a only moz-phab command away (after you set it up once, which took me under half an hour).
A full build on a slow machine can take hours indeed (on my 2015 macbook it takes about about 2 hours I think, but my beefy desktop finishes in under one hour). But you often do not even need a full build, but an artifact build[1], which brings it down to a few minutes and just a few seconds on rebuilds (./mach build faster).
>and most importantly people who can approve your changes clearly have more important things to do and regularly fail to answer.
Now that's actually a problem. It's usually not that they are too busy to respond, but that they do not read their bug mail (because they get thousands of emails a day). That's why you either have to actually request a review or need-info them on bugzilla. That usually draws their attention, simply because review requests are listed in a neat list and need-info-s are listed in another neat list, and if that still fails to grab attention, there is enough folks on the irc channels who can either help you directly or point you in the right direction.
./mach bootstrap will usually help you set up your environment mostly automated after some confirmations, and will ask you if you want to do full builds or artifact builds, too
It used to be ridiculously hard, back in the days of hq merge queues or even cvs, I give you that, but the general build stuff improved a lot since then.
The build system is hg clone/git clone + ./mach bootstrap + ./mach build... And there is a lot of docs for it too. I wouldn't call that "borderline insane".
Submitting a patch for review is a only moz-phab command away (after you set it up once, which took me under half an hour).
A full build on a slow machine can take hours indeed (on my 2015 macbook it takes about about 2 hours I think, but my beefy desktop finishes in under one hour). But you often do not even need a full build, but an artifact build[1], which brings it down to a few minutes and just a few seconds on rebuilds (./mach build faster).
>and most importantly people who can approve your changes clearly have more important things to do and regularly fail to answer.
Now that's actually a problem. It's usually not that they are too busy to respond, but that they do not read their bug mail (because they get thousands of emails a day). That's why you either have to actually request a review or need-info them on bugzilla. That usually draws their attention, simply because review requests are listed in a neat list and need-info-s are listed in another neat list, and if that still fails to grab attention, there is enough folks on the irc channels who can either help you directly or point you in the right direction.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...