How to upgrade from the upstream Firefox theme

(This text is originally from issue #127)

Here's exactly how I upgrade:

Switch to my vanilla branch (where I already have the previous version of Firefox committed), remove the directories and re-add from the Firefox zip. There are special directories that have to be extracted and put in the right place for a theme.

How to extract from Firefox:

1. Download the official ZIP
2. Extract only omni.ja to a temporary directory
3. Rename omni.ja to omni.zip and use the command-line unzip too to extract (as file-roller can't handle it)
4. Wade through the directories to find the correct ones to copy to the (now-blank) locations in the repo's vanilla branch

Then, I basically copy the following directories over to the theme/chrome in the vanilla branch:

• chrome/browser/skin/classic/browser
• chrome/browser/skin/classic/communicator
• chrome/toolkit/skin/classic/global

Now, I git add . in the theme/chrome and git commit -a.

Then the fun task of merging in the changes and fixing conflicts begins! (It's usually not too bad, unless there's been a lot of theme churn on both sides.)

For commits:

I do a git status and look for easy visual changes (basically PNGs and SVGs). Having git auto-color its output really helps here. If there are conflicts there, I checkout whatever version is appropriate. There's no harm in doing multiple checkouts, either. You can also do a git log path/to/file.png to see what commits have happened, to help determine what has happened. If we havn't done anything relevant there, then a git checkout vanilla path/to/file.png else, git checkout master path/to/file.png — and again, you can check out one and the other and look in Nautilus to see it auto-update with a preview if you're not sure.

To get git colored output: git config --global color.ui true

The "fun" part is resolving all the CSS conflicts, especially in browser.css. That's where I'm at now.

Oh, naturally, I started a new branch called update-to-16, and that's where I'm doing this upgrading business. First step was to do a git merge vanilla and now it's the conflict resolution. When this is done, I'll do a commit and push the branch to the repo so you all can start playing with it too. (:

When you're trying to determine what happened in a conflict, you can reference this by using git blame path/to/file.css. At the leftmost side, there's a git commit id that you can use as a reference to see what happened. To view the lines changed, do a git diff 69fdbb0c^ 69fdbb0c (if the commit id is 69fdbb0c, for exmaple). This will let you view the changes between previous commit to that id (hence the ^) and the id itself. You can then look for the offending line and figure out how to resolve the commit.

Resolving might be:

• accepting our change
• accepting Mozilla's change
• adding Mozilla's change
• manually writing a new change that incorporates ours and Mozilla's in some way (this happens sometimes when the CSS rule and its properties change independently)

So, yeah, fun times. There are a lot of conflicts, especially in browser.css. I'll try to get this done though.