GJS maintainership / November Bug Squash Month

[philip chimento gmail com]

Hi list,

I have recently volunteered to take on some maintainership of GJS, as Giovanni, Cosimo, and Colin haven't had much time to work on it lately. This is an update on what I've been doing.

For the past month or so, I've been working on porting GJS's underlying JS engine to SpiderMonkey 31, which is the next stable release after 24 which we were previously using. This will gain lots of JS language features, such as Array.find(), the spread operator in function calls, and promises which I'm adding separately using the Lie library. Shout out to Endless which is sponsoring this porting work.

I've also been trying to make some improvements to make it easier to contribute to GJS, like cleaning up the build system a bit, and making the tests more straightforward. (The end goal being that I'd like to make GJS a welcoming enough project to attract a co-maintainer; two heads are better than one, and get patches reviewed a lot quicker.)

Since this is November Bug Squash Month, I thought it would be nice to clean out the bug tracker. If anybody reading this list has a patch that has been sitting around for a while, give me a shout and I'll take a look at it; or suggest a feature that you've long wanted to have in GJS. I'll also be going through old bugs and closing them if they've become obsolete. Help is welcome!

Lastly, if you develop an application that uses GJS and you want to help out, why not try running your application with GJS compiled from the SpiderMonkey 31 branch ("mozjs31") so we can have an early warning if anything broke? If you need a hand doing this, please let me know (this mailing list, or "ptomato" on IRC.)

Best,

Philip C