Bug 858 fix walkthrough: Private messages strip (rather than escape) HTML

[foxfirefey]

This is a walkthrough for how I tackled Bug 858 - Private messages strip (rather than escape) HTML. I'm not a very experienced DW developer, so you're going to see me do a lot of bumbling around as I try to figure things out. But, I'm going to document all of my wrong turns and head scratchings in the hopes that seeing the whole process laid out from start to finish might help people who aren't sure how to go about things. I will note ahead of time that some of the issues I run into won't happen to people on Dreamhacks--they're due to my setup not being completely right.

To be honest, this walkthrough is a bit advanced and best suited for people already comfortable with the command line and coding. I'm going to do another one soon and hope that it doesn't go as awkwardly as this one did.

Table of contents:

1. Preparation
2. Finding the relevant code to make changes on
3. Making the changes
4. Testing
5. Troubleshooting
6. Patch evaluation and clean up
7. Submitting the patch
8. Hindsight
9. Lessons Summary
10. Notes Summary

( The Walkthrough )

I hope this has been a useful walkthrough of the process of bug fixing and banging your head against things until they work. If anybody has questions about the contents here, or suggestions about things I should have done differently, feel free to comment!