The roads I take...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 05/2010 (February 1 - 7, 2010):

• Releases:
  I prepared SeaMonkey 2.0.3 builds, which are now available on FTP as well as the beta update channel for testing by our community, offering well over 100 bug fixes. If things go well, we should be able to release this update in sync with Firefox 3.5.8 on February 16th.
  The 2.0.x nightlies now carry a 2.0.4pre version number, but we have no firm schedule for the following updates yet (will coordinate with Firefox, possibly also Thunderbird drivers on that).
  Work on 2.0.3 also included putting up a first version of the release notes.
  I also tried to let the release process generate 64bit builds for Linux this time, those are fully experimental and will only appear as "contributed" builds though, they have no official status at all.
• Build Infrastructure:
  The move of our core buildbot master code to a shared location could be completed, Thunderbird will look into using the same code in the future and we closely mirror the Firefox setup now, making it easier for people patching their side to fix ours as well (and the other way round).
  Revision reporting on packaged tests is now both generic and respecting applications that are built from different repositories as the platform (like SeaMonkey or Thunderbird).
  Additionally, I continued working with Mozilla teams to get SeaMonkey data up on the graph server, which needed a firewall rule and a correction on the staging server's database, but testing looks good now and we should be able to go live on the real server soon.
• Download Progress Windows:
  I created screen shots of some additional proposals for improving the progress windows, requested ui-review on them to see which one wins out with our "UI tsar", and finally implemented the winning proposal in a patch, which should be very close to positive review by now.
• Build System, Packaging:
  After a few runs on the Mozilla Messaging try server, I could finalize the patch for merging our package manifests and also make Mac use a manifest, get reviews and check it in.
  Another patch I worked on is about making branding usage fit Mozilla standards more closely, which should also ease the life of people wanting to ship suite versions with a different branding than the official "SeaMonkey" trademark designs.
  Some discussions about build system variables reminded me that I should re-test and attach the papering-over patch for mailnews Qt port bustage which I've had locally for quite some time now.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Starting with SeaMonkey 2.0.3, the language packs are marked compatible with all 2.0.* versions.
  Also with this release, Japanese is joining the collection of officially available localizations.
  This was also the first time I played with and used the new L10n sign-off dashboard for a release - further opt-ins / sign-offs for SeaMonkey 2.0.x will all run through this tool now. See the m.d.l10n thread for more details on using this tool.
• Various Discussions:
  2.1 planning discussions, Alpha 1 and further steps for 1.9.3, Gecko 1.8.1.24 and SeaMonkey 1.x EOL, KompoZer integration work, new machines, FOSDEM, places history changes, module ownership, mozilla.org planning and "Mozilla" vs. "Firefox" websites, EOL for Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" on 1.9.3, langpacks and switching, etc.

I may not have posted a lot of Mozilla-related blog posts this week, but I got around to do quite some actual work. I wondered for a bit if I should post separately about the progress window work, but the ignorance of hard work I have been and am putting into those tiny windows as well as the vitriol from people who can't stand designs being modernized made me decide not to mention this work much. I know that it needed my work to even have progress windows at all in SeaMonkey 2.0 and I'm convinced that my current proposals and work can fix some of the shortcomings I had already know when doing the initial work and that were criticized by users, but a number of those users seem convinced that our team (especially myself) is not caring about what they say at all, so I don't feel like taking their dreams away. And the attempt of humor in the title of my post about the initial work was not well-received as well. In any case, I feel an obligation to improve work I started, but discussions with those users have taken any fun out of working on this part of the code. Maybe my rare tries of actually doing some coding should stay that rare or even stop completely. It's not like I wouldnj't have enough other work on my TODO list.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 04/2010 (January 25 - 31, 2010):

• Build Infrastructure:
  I installed a newer gcc on the Linux machines and started using it for trunk builds. Additionally, I synched our mozconfig files for trunk much more to what Firefox is running on trunk as well.
  Because I might be a bit crazy and like to put our machines under more pressure than they should be under, I even tried to turn on one additional test suite on trunk to try and find bugs to fix.
  I also helped Armen from Mozilla release engineering to get his current L10n build work into a shape so that it works fine with SeaMonkey/Thunderbird builds as well.
  Last not least, I filed a bug on disappearing Windows slaves - seems like we've overused the space available on our Parallels server.
• Packaging:
  As we want to run packaged tests on Mac some time, we will need to turn on tests on normal builds there, but need to care that the test files don't end up in file we deliver to users. That and us probably being the only ones who haven't done it yet was enough motivation for me to finally look into merging our package manifests and use one preprocessed file for all (three!) main platforms. I got all the way to having the "browser" section complete, based on the Firefox manifest and our current Linux/Windows ones, now I just need to do the sections for mail and all the other stuff we don't nearly have in common with Firefox - and then get this sucker tested and reviewed!
• Support Emails:
  Even if I tell people that I'm not the person to contact for support, a number of emails about that topic end up in my mailbox nevertheless, some directly, some via seamonkey-council. I tend to move them into a folder and batch-handle all of them every few weeks - or rather months. This week, it was time to do such a pass again, and I sent about 70-80 replies to them (I try to leave nobody without an answer), even though most of those are just one sentence and a templated section to look at our community page to find better and more responsive soruce for support.
• Various Discussions:
  2.1 planning discussions, Alpha 1 and further steps for 1.9.3, Gecko 1.8.1.24 and SeaMonkey 1.x EOL, YouTube and "HTML5 video" vs. Ogg, geolocation service options, new machines, getting codesighs and leak test data on graphs server, KompoZer integration work, L10n dashboard and sign-off, future add-ons UI, etc.

A good part of this week did run into various discussions and more buildbot tweaks, things are moving forward positively from all I'm seeing - we just need to get some more real development done on trunk, even though that slowly starts to pick up now. Any help to make SeaMonkey 2.1 an even better suite than 2.0 is appreciated, of course!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 03/2010 (January 18 - 24, 2010):

• Build Infrastructure:
  A lot of more work on L10n nightly updates until I finally got then to work. Note that any SeaMonkey nightly updates are complete updates only, as the tooling to do partials for nightlies on our normal build machine pools is not done yet, currently waiting on Mozilla RelEng there. Getting our nightly updates to work correctly needed changes across 3-4 repositories (including mozilla-central and comm-central), but everyone was cooperative and it ended up great.
  The next step I had on my mind was switching to packaged tests, both for being nearer to what Firefox run and making it possible to run test suite in parallel, esp. as mochitest-plain runs really long. To my surprise, this worked well, I needed only one small change to the generic test factory and it worked for SeaMonkey (I later coded up an improvement to report Mozilla revisions, but things worked fine without it) and tests did run fine except for a mailnews xpcshell problem, which I hope will be dealt with soon. With that, I could officially do the switch for the most part.
  I also did experimentally create some hourly builders to run on a 1.9.2 tree, which we don't really want to target for SeaMonkey, but want to at least build fine. I spotted a packaging problem that was a regression form a recent build system port and Serge swiftly fixed that one - thanks for that!
  And, as I now know how to deal with packaged tests and in the new architecture we should run them on normal debug and even optimized builds, I turned on the xpcshell test suite for SeaMonkey trunk Linux builds (the debug ones we do for leak testing), even if a number of failures show up there - it's the first step to fixing them. A one-cycle test run of the other suites pointed to some more issues to fix, but we don't have the machine power right now to run them all the time.
• Download Progress Windows:
  After some proposals have come up for fixing progress window shortcomings, we were looking for icons that were usable under our licenses, and when those failed to materialize, I went and created my own SVG icons to match the small ones we have right now, so I could produce larger versions. Having done that, I worked on patching the dialog and posted screen shots of this work in progress in the bug.
  Back when I did the version of those windows that is in 2.0 right now, I did the fastest solution I could while still applying a design facelift, now for 2.1 we should have the time to improve on that and correct problems we see with this 2.0 design.
  I also updated my patch for moving core build master code to a shared place.
• History Expiration:
  I'm risking the next flame war against me with this, but I did a patch to react to the places expiration rework done for the whole Mozilla platform, which also removes the ability to limit history to a fixed number of days or sites, but instead goes with a memory percentage. We will need to implement the cleaning up private data based on time frames to complement this to at least reduce the complaints, I think. While working on this, I saw that Thunderbird also has prefs for this around and filed a bug for them as well.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  As mentioned above, L10n nightly updates for SeaMonkey trunk work now, I posted to the L10n newsgroups about this as well.
• Various Discussions:
  Add-on compatibility communication, new machines, comm-central policy for requiring tests, nightly.m.o, possible platform roadmap options, Firebug 1.5 release, Firefox 3.6 release, external linkage for mailnews, KompoZer and SeaMonkey, YouTube and "HTML5 video" vs. Ogg, community-based geolocation service, etc.

This has been a really productive week again and it feels good to get real things moving and also start to do work and planning for SeaMonkey 2.1 now, turning the head back and putting out fires on 2.0 was really getting tedious - even though we have a slightly conservative approach here in SeaMonkey land, we are as much about progress and innovation as the rest of the Mozilla project (even if it is in our way and sometimes means the some changes are not as much into-your-face and revolutionary as in other projects but have more of a continuity label on them).
I hope we all can get into this more again now and get some exciting patches landed for the next version of our great suite.

I've been working on this for a few days now - and with some teak of last night it finally started working:

Localized nightlies for SeaMonkey "trunk" (i.e. those from latest-comm-central-trunk-l10n) now get automated updates, just like the US English ones do!

Of course, you'll only get an update if one is available, but string changes in Mozilla or SeaMonkey areas should not pose problems, our build system "merges" localizations for nightlies with the US English strings, so that you just will see untranslated strings where the localizer still has work to do.

In case ChatZilla or venkman have missing strings, we will break in the build stage and not produce nightlies or updates, though, as the "l10n-merge" process is currently unable to deal with those extensions.

I hope nightly testers will be happy and our localizations will get even more testing even before we ship alphas, betas or releases!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 02/2010 (January 11 - 17, 2010):

• Releases:
  SeaMonkey 2.0.2 was released on Monday, mainly fixing a Windows mailcompose freeze which was a regression from 2.0.1 work. The previous 2.0.2 scheduled for early February was renamed to 2.0.3 and moved to the middle of that month.
• Build Infrastructure:
  I finally attacked the problem of L10n nightlies not being triggered and for that moved right over to mirroring the Firefox setup as closely as possible. After fixing a glitch from some wrong variable-repurposing for WinCE build work, it was a success in that our new config allows us to go for things like split test cycles much more easily and that L10n nightlies are being produced, but I needed to split L10n nightly updates into a different bug and do some more work on that - and we're not completely there yet.
  Also, the release automation bustage fix found with 2.0.2 work could be checked in, as well as the switch of release automation to pulling chatzilla from hg, which I now found time to write a patch for.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  I finally came around to activating Italian ChatZilla and venkman, and Ukrainian SeaMonkey.
  As said above, work is going on for L10n nightly updates - right now, everything is actually working except that a wrong patch is being written into the snippets and so no update can be installed, even though builds know that it's available. I'm working on fixes for that (needs work across three Mercurial repositories).
• German L10n:
  To have something for reasonably testing the L10n building updates on trunk, I wanted German to build alright, so I went in and finally updated ChatZilla and venkman localizations, and while I was at it, DOM inspector and SeaMonkey as well. I also did small updates to DOM and security to sync them to current trunk development, but toolkit still needs a bit more work to be green on trunk.
• Various Discussions:
  Add-on compatibility center, new machines, comm-central policy for requiring tests, plans or no plans for platform releases, Lightning 1.0 Beta 1 release, external linkage for mailnews, Manifesto and privacy, profile management future, KompoZer and SeaMonkey, etc.

Work is definitely picking up, and I've also started trying the Mozilla Status Board tool, which will not replace but be an addition to my updates here - with the benefit of having a section of what I'm planning to do next. And my list of "next" items was quite large last week, I'll probably need to keep a few on that list this time as well...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 01/2010 (January 4 - 10, 2010):

• Releases:
  I prepared a 2.0.2 update this week, containing a very small set of fixes over 2.0.1, most importantly a fix for freezes in composing emails on Windows when the OE Contacts address book is present.
  Along with that short-cycled update, the previously planned 2.0.2 release scheduled for early February was renamed to 2.0.3.
  Unfortunately, the automated release process didn't perform completely without problems this time, I ran into a timeout with our mini as well as some bustage from a recent infrastructure update and did a patch for the latter.
  In the end, I got candidate builds and beta channel updates out on Tuesday evening, and could prepare all website changes by Sunday for a Monday release.
• Add-Ons:
  We're trying to encourage add-on authors to make their work compatible with SeaMonkey 2.0. Most of the work for that is being done on our side by Philip Chee, e.g. for sending out messages.
  We also would like to get an add-ons compatibility center set up on AMO though, and I prepared "SeaMonkey 2.0" wordmark images for that.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  After the 2.0 release, we have been pointed to a license problem with packaging dictionaries into language packs, which we worked around in the recent releases, but for the future (beginning with 2.0.3), we're not shipping dictionaries in langpacks to resolve this. We now are only packaging the chrome localization, perfectly matching what Firefox does. This also makes it easier to merge more of the build processes across Mozilla applications in the future.
  If you are using language packs and want the matching dictionary installed in the future, fetch it from AMO - which makes it even available if you switch between languages.
  The fully localized builds are not affected and still contain the matching dictionary (if available under the MPL from Mozilla repositories), by the way.
• Various Discussions:
  L10n build infrastructure, close button on tabs, build system porting, AIX port, extension dependencies, future of theme and extension systems, external linkage for mailnews, etc.

With my dad's birthday in the middle of the week, I once again spent most of the week at home with my parents and didn't get around to a whole lot of work, but still tried to start picking up the pace at least somewhat - with a priority on shipping the mail compose freeze fix to Windows users in the 2.0.2 update.
As of right now, I'm back to a normal working schedule, and starting to think more and more about where to go with 2.1, both in terms of features and code work as well as timing. Unfortunately, I don't see the Firefox "Lorentz" story finalized as of now, but timing of the next Gecko/platform releases plays a critical role in our own release planning. I hope to see some light shed on those matters soon.

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 53/2009 (December 28, 2009 - January 3, 2010):

• Build Machines:
  While cleaning up some part of my email structure for the switch to the new year, I finally filed a few bugs on things I've had on my mind for some time now:
  Not shipping dictionaries with langpacks was the outcome of a license debate after the 2.0 release, I also did a patch for that but didn't come around to checking it in yet due to being on and off all the time currently.
  Once we know we won't ship releases from a point before the switch of ChatZilla to hg any more, we can also switch releases for that, but 2.0.2 has been short-cycled based on the pre-switch 2.0.1 release.
  Some localizers pointed to L10n builds not being generated daily, I need to figure this out soon, possibly together with L10n nightly updates.
  Since the recent Parallels upgrade, one of our Mac VMs has been running in the original 2-CPU configuration again and didn't show problems, so we can switch back the remaining ones as well. If that turns out fine, the Parallels experiment might still find a positive outcome.
  That could very much influence getting machines for a third SeaMonkey tree next to trunk and 1.9.1, as Parallels might be a viable option again now.
  And I requested signing infrastructure though I'm not yet completely sure what exactly we need there.
• German L10n:
  Just in time for the 10-year anniversary of German Mozilla releases, I dug out the first packages I created for M12 and M13 as well as the (English-only) announcements and put them up on the German SeaMonkey website so other people might indulge in nostalgia as well.
• Various Discussions:
  Windows 2.0.1 freeze when entering addresses (related to OE contacts), profile manager UI, external linkage for mailnews, Callek coming back to the intarwebs, etc.

This was another week in which I kept a low profile on work, spending some time with friends and doing some maintenance on my data - all of which are things I hope help turn out things well in this just-started year, which will host a nice anniversary for the SeaMonkey project - we're turning five years old!

Here's is more on my 10 years in the project: Exactly 10 years ago today, on January 1st, 2000, I released the first fully localized Mozilla release or milestone in German.

(I actually posted about its availability 2 hours before midnight my time, but didn't have any place to upload files back then, so I consider the next day the actual release day, when others could upload them somewhere to be accessible to the public.)

Yes, right on the "Y2K day" so many people feared, just 15 days after I posted first on the L10n group and was assigned German localizer, I made a fully localized M12 available to the public - starting a story that is still ongoing, now with a community of German localizers bringing all major Mozilla applications to the largest user base of a locale other than US English, and me still doing the suite part of that, now under the SeaMonkey brand.

To celebrate this anniversary, I added a download page and news story for that release to the German SeaMonkey website today (and the same for M13, which was also still missing).

I almost can't believe I've been serving the German community those builds for 10 years now - and most of that time, I did all the packaging myself, creating language packs and tearing apart en-US binaries to create German one by replacing the L10n files, manually in the beginning, with a script in later years. It's only been now since SeaMonkey 2.0 (including Alpha/Beta) that the Mozilla build machinery has started to produce those for the suite as well and I don't have to run things locally and by myself.

With that, I wish a successful new year ("Ein erfolgreiches neues Jahr" in German) and hope for continuing to serve the community with localized builds for a long time to come!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 52/2009 (December 21 - 27, 2009):

• Websites:
  Had forgotten to upload 2.0 page when releasing 2.0.1 but corrected that now.
• Various Discussions:
  Windows 2.0.1 freeze when entering addresses (related to OE contacts), Serbian L10n, external linkage for mailnews, etc.

Most of that week I spent at home relaxing, celebrating Christmas and playing some games with my parents. This week I'm starting a bit to come back, but celebrating the New Year will probably take away some more of my time. I hope everyone else is also refilling their batteries and coming back to full power in 2010!

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 51/2009 (December 14 - 20, 2009):

• Releases:
  Released SeaMonkey 2.0.1, updating security and stability compared to 2.0 final, as well as fixing a number of other glitches found in the previous final release.
  As a side note, we know that caused lots of users to experience automated update the first time ever and leaves a number of them more or less excited!
• Build Machines:
  My patches for the buildbotcustom breakage and the checkout timeouts got reviews and were checked in.
  I also could get reviews for freezing branch extensions so that we don't inadvertently take string changes on the branch any more, which I checked in together with pulling ChatZilla from Mercurial on the branch.
  This made us not need local patching on the buildmaster any more, we're now finally running an unpatched tip of buildbotcustom there.
  After clobbering the dist/ directory on build machines, we saw some Windows failures that could be resolved with a full objdir clobber.
  At the weekend, we had problems with a build machine that only Mozilla System Operations could fix, I filed a bug for that.
• Metrics and Bug Radars:
  I worked myself through some numbers on the release bug radars that should not be, like any unfixed blocking bugs or requests on shipped releases, or similar things with approvals, or bugs targeted at shipped milestones. I could clear out most of those, or request them to be cleared, and one is a blocker that got reopened.
  I also did some work on improving how we receive data about daily downloads and active users from the Mozilla metrics team and how we store them and create reports. I got some preliminary views of the data done, but need to do more work on all this before making those reports fully accessible to the public.
  For now, I can tell you that we have almost 500,000 manually triggered downloads of SeaMonkey 2.0 (significantly more than any other version in 2009), peaking at almost 30,000 per day on October 28, and 1.1.x downloads dropping to <4% of the daily total since that day. Active Daily Users ("ADU") on 2.x have risen to over 50,000 as of December 12th (which is the last day we currently have data from), over 97% of those on stable releases, 550-650 on nightlies (150-200 of those on 2.1a1pre).
  More data will come in the following weeks, once I come around to work on the presentation a bit more.
• Various Discussions:
  Windows 2.0.1 freeze when entering addresses (related to OE contacts), Lightning beta nearing, interview for article on Asa's non-Google recommendation, 1.9.1.7 fast-cycle release, Serbian L10n, continued SeaMonkey 2.0 feedback and support group bashing, add-on support and compatibility and ways of improving that, Mozilla domain names (.com/.org), possible changes in Mozilla roadmap, Manifesto and privacy, etc.

It's good to be back into doing actual work after the vacation, but I also noticed that Christmas neared way faster than expected during working backlog and trying to stay relaxed - I've not even drunk any cup of Punch this winter even though our Christmas markets are so famous for all kinds of variations of that stuff (as well as "Glühwein" and "Glühmost", which are wine- or cider-based hot drinks). At least I could complete my collection of presents today...

With that, I wish y'all who celebrate it a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays if you have some, and all others a good time this week - I'll mostly step back from work and spend some time with my parents, grandparents, brother and probably his future wife, possibly also some friends of the family.