I have a lot of respect for Gervase Markham's Patch Maker, so much that I really can't imagine hacking Mozilla without it. Sure, there's a few weak spots in it -- I use timeless's cvsdo and cvsu Perl scripts for actually adding files to my local CVS tree.
One of the reasons I love Patch Maker so much is the fact that you can do all your important stuff in one command line -- call up files, list the files in a patch you're working on, back the patch out or put it back in, add a file to the patch, diff, etc. Well, almost. If you want to rebuild a certain directory, you have had to change to the directory, do a "gmake -f Makefile" from there, and then change back out to the /mozilla directory.
Not much fun. Until I put a little Perl code together to automate that process for me too. Gerv had reserved a "pmmake()" subroutine in his Patch Maker script, but never implemented it. With a little creative design work to find the right Makefile files to use (once!), I actually managed to get it working. Not bad, I think, when I only touch Perl code once every six months...
I hope Gerv applies the patch and releases a new sub-version of Patch Maker. pmmake() is so useful right off the bat that I've found another reason to love Patch Maker. You want me to hack the lizard without it? You must be joking.
Looks like I get to go home again!
The O'Reilly Open Source Convention, my e-mail inbox informs me, will be held at the Portland Marriott in the week of July 25. Which makes me just peachy.
I've been thinking for a few days about trying to organize another Dev Day (like the one we had Nov 9 2001). The biggest question I have is "Where?"
But could we possibly set up a day in one of the Open Source Convention tracks for a Mozilla Technologies discussion? Or, if we had enough speakers, set up our own track at OSCON?
Sure, I'm ambitious. But if anyone out there is interested in speaking at OSCON about Mozilla and Mozilla-based technologies, please, let me know in replies to this entry. Given enough speakers, I can probably get OSCON to help us out. (Plus, speakers in past years have usually gotten free passes to the whole shebang of talks -- and I want to speak on DOM Inspector...)