The roads I take...

Here's a notification for all SeaMonkey nightly testers: We have just done a switching of profile locations for SeaMonkey 2.0a1pre trunk nightlies (Linux, Windows and OS/2, Mac stays unchanged).

See the "Moving Profiles from mozilla.org to Mozilla" wikimo page for detailed information on this.

We're actually only changing "mozilla.org" back to "Mozilla" in the profile path, so that SeaMonkey profiles will be, as requested a lot by testers, be back in parallel to the ones for other Mozilla-based applications again.

You should be able to just move or copy the profile to the new location and continue to use it, it might help in some cases to do the additional edits as described in the wiki document.

For Linux, we even have a script available from the wiki page that should do this all for you.

Note that this is only needed if you have been testing trunk "2.0a1pre" nightlies and valuable information in the profile for that version.
Users that don't have done such testing will be able to migrate their profiles from SeaMonkey 1.x to SeaMonkey 2 with our profile migration tool, but normal users should probably not test those pre-Alpha testing-only nightly versions for daily use, they are mere technology previews.

A few weeks ago I requested new SeaMonkey window icons, and I'm glad that someone found the time to really work on those and came up with really good proposals. With spinello, we have an experience icon designer on board, who already did some quite nice work for different Mozilla-related projects over at Add-Ons Mirror.

And here's the current state of the proposed new icons:


There's also a image of all available sizes along with the respective window names, see also the forum thread on Add-Ons Mirror.

It's still a bit undecided which of the two variants we'll take for the error ("JS") console, and there might be a few smaller changes still until they go into the tree and will be our official set for SeaMonkey 2, but we quite like those icons for the most part. If you have any comments or feedback on the icons, please direct them to the "Icons for SeaMonkey windows needed" thread on the SeaMonkey development newsgroup.

Thanks to spinello for the great work on that very noticeable improvement we'll have in place for SeaMonkey 2!

Here goes a summary of another work-intense period, to be more exact, of the SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related items I worked on in week 38/2007 (September 17 - 23):

• Old Files Cleanup:
  This was another great week for cleaning up files that were abandoned or moved elsewhere. The themes move is now completed and only the classic/global files and a contents.rdf still used by Camino are left over in mozilla/themes. I also removed the old help viewer - and Mark Banner could remove the old bookmarks and search components from xpfe, they have been move to suite/ and cleaned up a bit (he's even working on more things of that sort currently).
• Source L10n:
  I did come around to figure out a first WIP patch for CVS-based ChatZilla language packs, which will also be the base for the localized versions of ChatZilla via the repackaging scripts. I had a few fights with Makefile syntax, but it seems to work out nicely, though a few things still need to be figured out.
• German L10n:
  The DOM sync is in now, as well as two other toolkit updates, and finally we got green trunk trees for German!
  I also kept suite in sync with the page info update and could make the experimental German SeaMonkey repackaging tinderbox go green, which is a first in SeaMonkey L10n history. I hope to get in a tinderbox update that could enable us to set up SeaMonkey trunk tinderboxen for L10n repackaging generally.
• SeaMonkey start page:
  The new SeaMonkey default home page (or "start page") is online now - I invested some work again in fixing the last few issues before the switch and doing one or two slight fixes afterwards, but all in all this change seems to have worked smoothly.
• KaiRo.at Bug Bounty Program / Page Info:
  The rework of the SeaMonkey page info dialog has landed in trunk builds, as you might have read - and that also means that the first item of the KaiRo.at Bug Bounty Program list has been completed!
  KaiRo.at was more than happy to pay this bounty for a nice improvement in the SeaMonkey 2 user experience.
• Various Discussions:
  Community tinderboxen, login manager, community giving, leak finding, libxul, profile switching, MailCo, 1.1.5 planning, URLbar autocomplete, etc.

This week, I could also complete a few items of other work I have lagged behind on, so I feel less stressed, which is good. Oh, and I even had the time to play a bit and bring some Sea-Monkeys to life, so now I have my personal "SeaMonkey think tank" around here all the time

I just updated the default home page of SeaMonkey to be more helpful to normal users and also warn anyone who is using old versions so that they hopefully upgrade to newer, more secure SeaMonkey versions.

This should hopefully make a more polished impression on SeaMonkey users and at the same time provide a reminder to people who are using insecure, old versions and might have turned off our update notification feature.

All dynamic on this page is done via JavaScript, but users who deactivate JS will just see the same page as someone using the current stable release is seeing. All other variants are triggered by the respective user agent strings that unstable or old versions or even non-SeaMonkey browsers (who are unlikely to see this page) have.

If you have any further questions or comments on this page, please post them to the SeaMonkey support group/list.

As I told in the last status report, I got a Sea-Monkeys set for my birthday. So, in the last days, I tried to start breeding what I think are the first living Sea-Monkeys in the SeaMonkey project team.



In looking what our suite's name is derived from, I have read a lot about how those pets are grown and how to care for them, it's interesting to get some first-hand experience now.
I heard many stories of children being disappointed because those animals don't look like their counterparts in the ads for those sets, but I knew I wouldn't fall into that trap, as I already know they look different.
Unfortunately, the promise of them hatching instantly couldn't hold true in my set as well though, I didn't see anything but dots that supposedly are food and tiny eggs - no wiggling tiny things that looked like they'd live. I guess that would be another thing that would disappoint children...

Anyways, today, about 48 hours after putting in those "instant live eggs", I could actually see some about 1mm long wiggling things more or less swimming around in the tank.



The really tiny things are hard to photograph, but I'm told they'll grow fast in the first few days. The baby Sea_monkeys are there for sure though, and I curious how the'll continue to grow bigger. I'll add new photos from time to time to my Sea-Monkeys gallery, check back there if you are interested in their growth. I'll also post here again when I have some better photos.

I'm currently behind schedule with almost everything I'm doing, so here's a very short summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related items I worked on in week 37/2007 (September 10 - 16):

• Source L10n:
  While we still don't have L10n repackaging machines, I did set up my "tpol" tinderbox to repackage German builds for a first test and fixed a small bug that had crept into our repackaging Makefile.
  We now have experimental repackaged German Windows tinderbox builds up in the tpol-trunk directory, but we know that some things are still broken - mainly those that are marked as dependencies on the SeaMonkey source L10n bug.
• German L10n:
  The first part of the DOM sync is in, but we still need to figure out a few strings. After this and another toolkit update, we hope to see green trunk trees for German again.
• MoFo ED Search:
  The Mozilla Foundation Executive Director Search Committee did a first round of interviews with the first candidates, which was an interesting experience but I can't tell you about details this time. Maybe the second round will give some room for infos, surely the third will be more public though.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey vendor ID and profile location, toolbar customization, storage templates, automatic updates, community giving, page info, extension L10n, new start page, etc.

As I had my birthday in that week, I got some DVD boxes featuring the "real" T'Pol among others from SeaMonkey users who want to give something back to the team - thanks for those nice presents. I also received a real Sea-Monkeys set from my brother (yes, those living animals) so be sure to see some pictures of real Sea-Monkeys here soon!

Another interesting week has passed, here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related items I worked on in week 36/2007 (September 3 - 9):

• Website work:
  Some smaller updates have been done on the new SeaMonkey site, no major changes, though. It will probably still take a bit until this is fully ready for production.
  The new start page should be fairly ready for taking over the default SeaMonkey homepage though. Please direct any further comments to the the development newsgroup.
• Source L10n:
  After my work to get the ball rolling on source L10n for ChatZilla and venkman, I ran into the discussion I've been awaiting and the I more or less intended to trigger with that work, and we're nearing a solution that should probably work for all in-tree extensions some time in the future.
  We'll probably go with so-called "dependent language packs", which is very near to what ChatZilla used to do up to now, in a way that also fits with 1.9-style way of doing things, but doesn't lose backwards compatibility to older applications.
  See the L10n newsgroup for more about this.
• German L10n:
  Checked in another small update for other shared L10n, and a significant amount of the DOM L10n update should land soon, so I hope we can make German trunk tinderbox go green.
• SeaMonkey vendor ID and profile location change:
  The patch to Change SeaMonkey Vendor ID to "Mozilla" should go in soon, we are currently figuring out how to concretely get the profile location move and helper scripts for it announced to nightly users.
• Themes move:
  The move of SeaMonkey-specific theming to suite/ is done, I'm still looking into what we can clean up in the toplevel themes/ directory as Camino-like-Firefox is, unlike Firefox, still using "something" from there.
• Mozilla Foundation ED Search:
  The Mozilla Foundation Executive Director Search Committee is ready for the first round of interviews with candidates for this job. This round is closed, only the Committee knows who are candidates are and only we are interviewers as well as listen to what the candidates have to tell. This is for getting a first impression of who those people are, we'd like to pull more community members into the second round and possibly be able to make the third round completely open, so that everyone interested in the community can participate at least as listeners/viewers then.
  See also the minutes of our July 26 meeting.
  For now, we're in the early stages and only starting on the first, closed round of interviews. I'm anxious to hear what our candidates have to tell us. Unfortunately I'm only participating on the phone, it probably would be nice to actually see faces as well or be in the same room, as some other Committee members actually are.
• Various Discussions:
  notification bars, toolbar customization, storage templates, SeaMonkey packaging, L10n repackaging, login manager, automatic updates, community giving etc.

As a side note, I did meet timeless, a long-time Mozilla contributor, on Sunday while he was visiting Vienna - if anyone of you is stopping by here in his travels, pass me a note, I'd be happy to meet and chat with other Mozilla folks. I can also show you around here, if you like

Reading through Planet, I came across Johnathan Nightingale's post about Gaming on quality criteria to meet release schedules, which I found interesting. He wondered why Mozilla was different in that regard to traditional software companies - and that made me think about it as well, arriving at an interesting answer: openness and the community make the difference.
Those two factors enable a state of constantly being reminded that you can't be sloppy on release criteria. You just can't downgrade an issue from a release blocker without a really good reason. You have to account for this change to the community before the actual release while in traditional software development, the user community will complain about problems solely after the release.

And that's the really big difference.

We have learned this process pretty well over the years in the Mozilla project, and managed to deliver constantly high quality releases because of that - and we even remember when Netscape ignored our community voices and released their 6.0 "final" from code that we wouldn't have dared to call a Mozilla final release.

In my comment on that other blog post, I ended with 3 guidelines I derive from what I think we have learned in the Mozilla project when it comes down to releases, and I'd like to repeat them here:

1. Make your processes open, have the community actively participate, and quality will profit.
2. Believe testers in the community. Sure, they are talking about their pet feature/bug, so take feedback with a grain of salt. But at least re-think if what you’re doing is really what you should do when the community disagrees. There’s some possibility that they are actually right.
3. Never ship on a fixed schedule and never rush a release. Only, ever, ship when it’s ready to be shipped, never before that point. It’s better to tell users you need to ship a month or two later to meet your high internal quality standards and have some press about people eagerly waiting on your release than to ship right on time and have even more press about how your product sucks.

Die beliebteste PoP-Partei (naja, man darf sich wohl selbst loben) hat jetzt einen neuen Namen:

DeusX - Die Welt ist nicht genug

Und da natürlich auch der Name alleine nicht genug ist, haben wir gleich einen neuen Vorstand gewählt

Ich bin natürlich als Webmaster weiter dabei, drücke mich aber davor, mich Wahlen zu stellen - diktatorisch arbeiten ist halt schöner
(Na gut, was würde es bringen, jemand zu wählen, der das System, das ich gemacht habe und auf meinem Server läuft, zu verwalten und weiter zu programmieren.)

Damit hoffe ich auch, dass die Wirren und Diskussionen nach der größten Fusion von PoP (UME + SPQR + Teile aus anderen Parteien) endlich abgeschlossen sind und beiseite gesteckt werden können.

Jetzt können wir mit neuer Power weiter arbeiten, und versuchen, wieder größte Partei zu werden. Eindeutiger "Gegner" dabei ist die derzeit größte Partei, die ESD, mit der wir uns weiter sportlich rittern werden. Wir als realpolitisch unabhängige Truppe gegen die deutlich realpolitisch orientierten Mitbewerber ist lustig genug, zusätzlich haben einige Leute bei uns ja Erfahrungen in Dingen wie einem spielerischen Diskussions-"Hunt" gegenüber dieser Partei

Ich persönlich bin noch immer beim "Hunt" auf den Diskussions-12er, aber komme dem immer näher - und auch die Führung in Salzburg könnten wir wieder erreichen!

Auf zu neuen Herausforderungen!
Die Welt ist nicht genug!

This has been a really tightly filled week once again - see for yourself in the following summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related items I worked on in week 35/2007 (August 27 - September 2):

• Website work:
  I did some further work for the future SeaMonkey website, as you can see on the preview site. Still help on content and feedback is appreciated in the development newsgroup.
  We now have all changes in that are needed for possibly introducing localization in the future, the download box on the main page is dynamic if the user has JS activated in his browser, all links should be correct and working, I hope all pages validate, all old breadcrumbs should be removed, and many other such changes.
  A version of the site has been set up on a production-ready system, if the change has been already propagated to your DNS, you should be able to access that one at www-stage.seamonkeyproject.org for now.
• Source L10n:
  I got source L10n for ChatZilla going and have patches read for enabling it for venkman as well.
  This means that we will be able to host localizations for those extensions in mozilla.org CVS now and will be able to build localized versions with the same tools the the original US English ones - for the XPIs as well as for the versions included in (trunk) SeaMonkey builds.
• German L10n:
  Checked in the big update for German security L10n, did some further work on the DOM part of this effort, landed some updates for other shared L10n and kept suite up-to-date with trunk.
  Oh, and I have landed German ChatZilla L10n so it's already usable with the source L10n described above.
  Once the DOM patch and one other toolkit update I added in the same bug as the other shared one are in, we have a complete German L10n of trunk Core again, and I think Firefox is also up-to-date, which should make a German trunk tinderbox go green once again
• SeaMonkey vendor ID and profile location change:
  Led a bigger discussion around the Change SeaMonkey Vendor ID to "Mozilla" bug.
  We will be doing that, which means that all trunk testers will need to move their profiles from the mozilla.org path to the Mozilla one, but this should be fairly easy, as a simple move is enough.
• Code cleanups:
  After Thunderbird and SeaMonkey switched to using toolkit's printUtils instead of an older version from xpfe times, I could remove xpfe/communicator from Thunderbird, which makes Camino-like-Firefox the last potential user of both the xpfe/global and xpfe/communicator directories.
  I also filed a bug and patch on moving SeaMonkey-specific theming to suite/, which should add the toplevel themes/ directory to that almost-orphaned list.
  Additionally, I found out that extensions/help should be completely unused but still around, and filed a bug for removing it from CVS.
• mozStorage Explorer:
  I filed a bug and patch for supporting SeaMonkey in the mozStorage Explorer, which is "a simple little addon [...] that lets you run queries on databases found in your profile", as its creator Shawn Wilsher explains.
  Due to the ability of the new chrome registry .manifest files to do app-specific overlays, this was really easy to do.
  Watch out for a future version of the tool that runs in SeaMonkey!
• Air Mozilla:
  As mentioned earlier in this blog, I met the guy doing the Air Mozilla show, and was interviewed about Mozilla for this broadcast. Watch out for the next episodes!
• Crashes, compiling issues and SeaMonkey startup problems:
  Here's this week's section for nasty things.
  I encountered a printing crash while testing the printUtils fixes mentioned above, filed it and discovered I'm not the only one seeing it, as there were already some nice breakpad reports out there - even from Firefox.
  The I ran into a debug build compile error introduced by making the build process more picky - and some investigation (by me, as some someone who doesn't know much about C/C++) actually made us realize that the compiler is correct to choke on this problem - someone unexpectedly made a mRefPtr be a bitfield...
  (You don't understand what this is or why it matters? Don't worry, you're in good company, I don't either.)
  
  And then, there's this Windows startup issue. I filed a bug on a tinderbox startup test (Ts) slowdown and then realized, it was because of an old friend - the patch for VC8 CRT and XULRunner landed again, and we already had similar problems when it laded the first time. Even worse, the startup failure/crash caused by it back as well
  I hope a solution for it can be found soon, as the future target of building with libxul, which could probably also help solving it, is still too far out for now.
• Various Discussions:
  notification bars, toolbar customization, venkman revival, search component move, prefwindow rewrite, login manager, urlbar history, storage mechanisms, AMO dictionaries, mozpad meeting etc.

I probably spent too much time with work this week, something I shouldn't always do. But then, work on the Mozilla project is so much fun that I just can't stop

Some interesting patches have landed today (European time) in SeaMonkey land, with them all having one thing in common: They provide new architecture that is not used yet.

First, there's the extended toolkit prefwindow for SeaMonkey preferences, which is the architecture to build a SeaMonkey-style preferences window with the <prefwindow>, <prefpane>, <preferences> markup known from the "new toolkit". This work has been done by Karsten (Mnyromyr) and is cool because we can enter the new preferences world without giving up the look we and our users have grown to expect and like. Now the work to get the SeaMonkey pref panels actually use it can begin.

Second, the patch for notificationbox ("info bar") support in the SeaMonkey browser has landed, which also is a part of toolkit infrastructure we have now picked up - but we have no code yet that makes such notifications coming up. The ideal way to get the most important ones would be a global implementation in toolkit that could be used in any place that needs typical browser notifications. Thanks Teune (twanno) for getting this first step done and also working on folloups.

A third patch for not yet used infrastructure has been done by me, actually - and that one's for ChatZilla source L10n. And no, we can't build other than English versions of ChatZilla from the source yet. The basic structure changes are there though, all that's left now is to detect if a localization is supported and available, use it, or still fall back to the default English version, which is the next step I will work on. I'll still need to invent some magic for that, but the rest of the code and restructuring around it is there.

Oh, and in global code, the malware blocking code for Gecko has landed, which AFAIK does also not surface yet, as we don't have a list of malware sites that it would block yet - or that is, SeaMonkey doesn't, maybe Firefox does get it somehow with the same mechanism that is also used for their phishing protection.

So, those are interesting times for SeaMonkey developers, we get more and more good tooling to work - we just need to start using it as well