Patch Maker is my software for quickening the process of making, testing, getting reviewed and generally managing patches to a bit of software stored in a CVS or SVN repository. It particularly helps when you are making multiple, possibly conflicting patches at the same time.
After two and a half years, I’ve just released version 3.0. The key changes are the addition of initial support for SVN as well as CVS, and removal of the old “build mode”, which was used for editing Mozilla project products in-place. This required a file called chromelist.txt to map from installed chrome paths to CVS paths, and this is no longer shipped for size reasons. So it’s not nearly as useful as it was. This and other feature removals has reduced the code size by 25%.
So you removed useful functionality to cut down the file size. Um, this doesn’t make sense at all – you seem to have a way over-zealous version of the Firefox ‘keep it lean’ ideology. Cutting features to save file size, particularly in this age of broadband, is senseless.
Why don’t you ship that file separately for people who want it, and hide the functionality unless that file is present?
Sorry, having reread the above, it’s unclear. The point is that Firefox and Thunderbird no longer ships the file “chromelist.txt” for size reasons. This file maps chrome paths to CVS paths for every chrome file, and so changes every time a file is added to or removed from CVS, and so has to ship with the build – it doesn’t make sense to ship it separately. The Firefox team have an absolute laser focus on reducing download size, and it was several hundred K uncompressed. I have no say over whether Firefox ships this file or not, but to me it seems like a sensible decision.
However, it does make build mode much less useful than it was, so I removed it. Other considerations were that it’s very hard to test it, because I don’t use it any more. Anyone who still wishes to use build mode, and who builds Firefox themselves and so can build a copy of chromelist.txt (but then, why not use the CVS mode?) can use version 2.1.2, which is still available.