Released into the wild

Open source development has been a roller coaster ride in the most extreme sense.

It's been like trying to climb a vertical wall, and facing a challenge that just doesn't seem possible. Moments of "EUREKA!! I'VE GOT IT!!!!" are proceeded almost immediately with "Wait, that's not what I'm supposed to do at all...", and followed soon by "Yet another dragon to slay. *sigh*".

It's not like other courses, where intuition nets me a B+ and can finish assignments in a midnight rush. Here, my intuition leads me into confusion and circular mazes. I used to be able to think up contingency plans effortlessly until the problems get solved; with Open Source, none of these plans work out in the end... ever. It's like being Superman, but without the power of the yellow sun.

Here's how yesterday started:

I thought I had achieved a peak of pure genius when I changed MyBrowser's application.ini file to recognize Gecko 1.9 (which C3d needs). Sadly, it refused to install the extension through addons.mozilla.org. So, I default to using a Minefield build, which installed C3d just fine, but it didn't carry the extension when rar'd and sent to another computer.

At the brink of despair, I plodded back into #seneca, where I was greeted with welcome arms and a new strategy. Instead of hacking Firefox to store everything locally, I could just run "make profile" to do almost the same thing. Extensions became simple to include, too. I suppose I had wandered alone long enough to earn the one answer I needed to finally achieve the goal.

Then, mfinkle pops in and tells me I can still do what I need to do, but through MyBrowser instead. After several loops through editing rdf's and ini's, I am now back to coercing MyBrowser to use the C3d extension...

Here's the details on the mixed adventure, rephrased so I sound like I almost know what I'm doing.