This lab felt like another "Search and Destroy" task. Well...not really "destroy", but change.
I found the searching to be the more difficult part of this lab as we're to look for some old changes that's different from the current MXR. I kind of wished the MXR kept multiple version so we can actually look up stuff in the version we want. But of course, that's asking for too much as there are sooooooo many code that it'll be a hassle to keep different versions for all the code.
After the "target" has been found, the code wasn't hard to change, as it is pretty much given in the lab.
Thoughts about Labs
Labs are very helpful for computer courses as they give you the hands on experience with doing the actual work. However, in my case in this course, I find the labs a little annoying to do since they don't really contribute too much to what I have to do in the course. I'd wish the labs aren't mandatory and are just counted as bonus marks or some how incorporate into our marks to help lighten the mark weight of our other work.
I have nothing against the labs in this course. They're great for helping us understand Mozilla. But when we have to do something that's not really helping with what we're suppose to do, it does get annoying at times.
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3 comments:
Search and kaboom, if you don't know what you're doing. I think they really knew what they were doing when they called the development version of FireFox as MineField.
Honestly, if you don't know what you're doing around that massive source code and happen to step onto some insane change that you don't even know what happened... that whole thing just explodes and you're left with a mess.
This is a search and survive story, rather than a search and destroy. As much as I'd love to say I'm in control of the mozilla code, that is NEVER the case.
I thought I knew the code I was working with pretty well...... I really did, but did I really? Its been a while since i picked up the project. Maybe I'm gonna have to go through a whole phase of "Search and avoid the Mines again" process.
Labs is really just filler to make sure we get a mark. I agree some of it is really unnecessary, but... our marks has to come from SOMEWHERE I guess.
Hey, I just blogged in your blog.
Umm, you guys know about the list of different versions of the code on http://mxr.mozilla.org/ - right? I'm not sure where you were supposed to change something (I haven't seen your labs exercise spec) but the stable release code you should mostly be able to find in MXR - possibly with more branch modifications than you expected, but these don't usually hugely affect the stuff you're working on.
I guess I haven't looked into MXR enough. I haven't really used it much so I'm sure there are still a lot of stuff about it that I didn't know.
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