My many mistakes in my effort at testing mouselock

I didn’t get far at all in my work at debugging mouselock, I just ran into a massive stumbling block right at the very start of my attempt which could have been avoided by asking a few very simple questions on IRC.

So I got assigned to work on developing a test that would handle whether or not the mouse cursor was disappearing/ reappearing depending on whether or not mouselock was activated.  Sounded simple enough.   Because there was no way that anybody currently knew how to test for the visibility of the cursor it was going to be a litmus test.  So I think to myself, OK, I’ll work on a js that will call up mouselock with a button the user can

After reading through the instructions I realized that I needed to do a rebuild of Firefox, and that’s where my misadventure with testing mouselock began.  For some stupid reason I kept trying to build it not from the mozilla build shell but from Git and the windows command line with the predictable failure to compile.   I could have asked on IRC but I just didn’t because it felt like I was asking an incredibly stupid question.  Something I was supposed to have known from weeks ago, after all I did manage to get a build up and running mid November.  There’s also the fact that I was pretty convinced that what I was doing was the correct way of doing things and that it was probably something else causing the problem. (a necessary executable like gmake missing or autoconf).  It wasn’t until Diogo gave me a good swift kick in the butt on Skype while talking about our BTS assignment that I finally got on IRC and after managing to talk with Humph finally figured out that I needed.   Unfortunately though, it had been almost a week since and my test component was by that point long overdue.   So four wasted days of me scratching my head and essentially being clueless about how to rebuild mozilla-central could have been averted had I asked early on for assistance.

I hope this blog entry doesn’t come off as whiny or sound like I’m  trying to excuse my utter lack of progress on the testing work that I volunteered to do.  I’m not,, I just want to have this entry as a reminder to myself of the glaring flaw in how I’ve been approaching my work that I should learn to overcome.

Moral of the story is, not asking that stupid question can often times end up making you seem like a much bigger idiot.