The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 29/2010 (July 19 - 25, 2010):

• Releases:
  I did finish the relnotes, announcements and everything else needed and could push SeaMonkey 2.0.6 on Tuesday.
• Lightweight Themes / Personas:
  The main lightweight themes patch landed, they should work fine on trunk now!
  The next step, some security button fixup also could land this week, that status bar panel will now work nicely with lightweight themes and, esp. for sites with EV certificates, will even look much better on the normal default theme.
  I've started work on improving tab bar look as well, which should make the default theme look more modern and make lightweight themes nicer as well (no solid background image stripe between tabs and web content any more).
• Automated tests:
  A fix for the plugin notifications test I had done some work on got tested and could land, my first step for addons searching test failures did prove to be worthwhile for users but not helping the test, but IanN fixed the function calling the add-ons manager, and that fixed those tests finally.
  A number of automated test failures remain on trunk builds, any help to fix those is appreciated!
• Tabbed Browsing:
  I figured we should finally default to tabbed browsing in SeaMonkey (prefs for using windows still exist) and created a patch to sync up our default tab setting with those used by Firefox.
  I also filed a bug for better tab loading indicators when I stumbled over what Firefox has in the tab bar theming work.
• Data Manager:
  I didn't get around to look into much this week, but I heard no negative feedback so far.
  Please continue testing version 0.9 and give me any feedback you can!
• Places:
  This week, I finally did split places bookmarks work into several bugs, one for each part of the patch series. I hope that eases reviews by isolating comments about a single topic in a single bug.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey find bar, SeaMonkey Development Meeting, security bug, automated updates, user agent string changes, bugzilla platform fields, possible organization for SeaMonkey, L20n file format and overview, etc.

A number of good things landed this week in SeaMonkey in general, my lightweight themes patch is just one of them - others are e.g. support for findbar instead of an extra modal "find in page" window, add-ons manager being able to open to a certain list again and not opening more than once, address book toolbar customization, support of selectTabAtIndex() function in tabbed browser, test fixes and completion of the deprecation of <popup> in our code. Thanks to everyone who has worked on reporting those bugs, finding out solutions, creating those patches, testing and reviewing them as well as finally getting them into the source!
I hope we'll continue in such a pace in the future, as then the upcoming 2.1 will be a very great product (and I have no doubts that it will be).

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 28/2010 (July 12 - 18, 2010):

• Lightweight Themes / Personas:
  I had some fights with Neil over tangential issues, but after I split off the questionable issues into their own bug reports, so that the main lightweight themes patch could get reviews in the end. I also filed followups bugs for Mac, MailNews, Composer as well as tracking of overall default theme improvements.
• Build System:
  I landed the packaging updates for the XPCOM registration changes but it took another build fix until I could open the tree.
• Misc changes:
  The getFileDisplayName cleanup and tabContainer rename patches could land.
• Google Summer of Code:
  As you might know, I'm mentoring Harini Sirisena in her "Weave Sync engines for tabs and mailnews status sync in Mozilla Seamonkey browser suite" project as a part of Google Summer of Code. This week was time for midterm evaluations, and it's just fitting that she could make MailNews Sync available as an installable add-on. We'd welcome any feedback you can give!
• Data Manager:
  The feature complete version 0.9 is public at AMO, I got a small bit of feedback (thanks, Jens!) and I found there might be some performance concerns, which I need to take a look at, but there has been no progress in terms of code this week.
  Until I come around to looking into that, please test version 0.9 and give me any feedback you can!
• Places:
  There has not been real progress on places bookmarks themselves, though I had some discussion with Neil about them. I'll probably split the work into several smaller bugs to ease review, until then, I'd like more feedback on the current try builds.
  I also spent a number of hours this weekend on porting tests so that we have some automated tests covering places once this lands.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey find bar, possible SeaMonkey Development Meeting, build machines, plugins test bustage, MPL update, Sync UI, Thunderbird plans, etc.

As the Backend for Sync has already landed in the Mozilla 2.0 backend code, even though it's not built in normal builds right now, we should try to move the UI code into SeaMonkey code, just like it's being done for Firefox. If anyone reading this can help us there, that would be very welcome and make our work, including that of the GSoC project mentioned above easier to integrate into final SeaMonkey code!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 27/2010 (July 5 - 11, 2010):

• Releases:
  Wrote release notes, an announcement and finally released SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 2 on Wednesday, showing some suite-specific work as well as platform work to testers.
  I also updated the changes page for the upcoming 2.0.6 security update.
• Lightweight Themes / Personas:
  After having investigated that topic some time ago, wondering why it didn't work right away, I worked on lightweight themes (a.k.a. Personas) for SeaMonkey 2.1, and without too much work, I was successful! I hope we can get it into the main code soon, even if I am more of a friend of full themes, I think many people will want to use that lighter system.
• Build System:
  I watched making SeaMonkey compatible with the new XPCOM registration and when builds started succeeding again, I created a patch to update packaging and it helped well with getting us up to speed with packaged tests. We still leave the tree closed until static builds run and we can enable nightlies again.
• Misc changes:
  I ported a small cleanup patch to SeaMonkey, and completed a rename of a tabbrowser variable, both of which are rather small changes, but make us cleaner and better compatible with Firefox.
• Data Manager:
  This week, I could complete work on all those UI updates for data change notifications, ending up having it be feature complete for the first step, and I finally submitted it as version 0.9 to Mozilla Add-Ons, now needing only more testing before it can be declared version 1.0 in the end and make its appearance as a patch for inclusion in SeaMonkey.
• Places:
  While Neil as the reviewer was in Whistler this week, there was no further progress on places bookmarks, the try builds still need further testing and feedback, though.
• German L10n:
  I landed two patches on German help localization thanks to Michael Opitz, this really should help improving the experience for German users in the future.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey Sync UI, Tabs On Top, SeaMonkey find bar, Firefox 4 Beta 1, etc.

As I had been disinvited to Whistler, I had a lot of time sitting around at home this week with an interestingly quiet Mozilla universe in my view. I had previously said I might spend the time indulging the several bottles of Whiskey I have around in my room, but in the end, the Classic Single Malts are too precious to drown your sorrow in Country Music style - and in the end, the best cure for frustration is working and being constructive - at least for a workaholic like me. Because of that, I used the time for writing up a few patches, and I hope esp. the lightweight themes work is something people will like!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 26/2010 (June 28 - July 4, 2010):

• Releases:
  After discussions in the SeaMonkey meeting on Tuesday, I created another round of candidate builds for 2.1 Alpha 2, including a few release blocker fixes. If testing looks good now, we'll release within days from now.
  Also, at the same time as Firefox 3.6.7 and 3.5.11 builds have been started, I did a SeaMonkey 2.0.6 release build run, candidate builds are available for that as well, and we're testing them on the beta channel to hopefully go public on July 20.
• Context Menus, Notifications:
  I've been informed that my earlier context menu code rework had broken bookmarking entries and created as well as landed a fix for that. That's the downside of having places bookmarks sitting in my local queue while working on other stuff - it can mask other problems in testing (I did test bookmarking, but only with the changed code from the places work).
  The doorhanger notifications patch got a few updates from Gavin's and Neil's comments and further work done on the Firefox side.
• Build System:
  I did the first tries to create libxul builds on my local machine to see how far we come there right now, and found autocomplete still broken, so I worked to unbitrot Neil's patches there and with his help, fix all build variants so this can land.
  And as we knew the large XPCOM registration change from Benjamin Smedberg would come around, I tried to drum up support for getting comm-central ready in time, but things have really only started moving heavily after his work landed on mozilla-central and broke us heavily. We're starting to see something that looks like the end of the tunnel being ahead now, but it's too early to tell if it's really it or just an oncoming train.
• Data Manager:
  After I got both cookie and password update notifications processed and what looked like reasonable testing, I submitted the 0.8 version to AMO, which is now coming close to 1.0, what's still missing is doing those UI updates for permissions, content prefs, and form data.
  Once that's done and I've submitted 1.0 to AMO, I'll prepare a patch for adding this functionality to SeaMonkey trunk, for now in parallel to the other managers we have. The next steps will be creating hooks to open a specific domain and/or tab, and adding permissions, then to switch over parts of SeaMonkey that now open the old managers to open Data Manager instead, and finally remove the old managers from SeaMonkey UI completely.
• Places:
  The places bookmarks patch series had been changed quite a bit over the last weeks, so I finally uploaded new patches and created another round of try builds. Please help testing those, I'll continue to push for getting the patches reviewed and into the tree, but Neil as the main reviewer is in Whistler this week, so he probably doesn't have much time for this.
• Themes:
  Once again, I did update my LCARStrek and EarlyBlue themes and now they have versions for SeaMonkey 2.1 Alpha 2 ready for that release.
• Various Discussions:
  Perma-oranges, UA strings, Sync landing, L20n file format, Firefox UI changes, etc.

Some good work progressed this week, even though I went out a bit more and had an awesome weekend with the wedding of my brother. It's fun to see how sometimes fewer working hours still result in an interesting amount of progress!