Week 5 - Patches.. ugh

Well, this week I have been reading on XUL and been playing around with Thunderbird's .css files, but mainly the toolbar.css file. This was given to me to understand better this application for my project. I learned about this cool add-on, DOMi, which allows me to view/edit objects that make up Thunderbird. Sometimes, it worked and other times the application would crash. In the end, I just changed the color of the toolbar...

...nothing special.

Anyways, now comes the troublesome part.. making a patch. Even while following the instructions in these two links (Working With Patches Lab and Creating A Patch), I ran into this one problem that lead to many more - the main problem was that the patch.txt would always be an empty file or too big file (for just changing 4 lines to 1 line). From chatting on IRC, thanks to Gijs, I found out that the editor can influence the diff command that is used to make this patch. Using VS, I managed to get rid of some problems - however, in the end, I am still stuck with getting an empty file or too big file. This is quite a setback...

- Update -

A day after, I learn a useful command by my teacher to bring my repository back to fresh: "hg revert -a". Once issued, I save my toolbar.css with the new changes in Visual Studio and do a fast re-compile using "make tier_app". To see if it finally shows the difference between the old toolbar.css and my toolbar.css, I do "hg diff -p -U 8" and ding! it works.

Lesson to be learned: use a proper editor when changing a file, such as Visual Studio.