Weekly Status Report, W21/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 21/2008 (May 19 - 25, 2008):

• Automated Testing:
  We got the hardware set up for the Mac buildbot slave, but I still need to figure out how to log in and get the software up and running.
  While I'm on the topic of testing, there has been some talk about turning off the TUnit tests on the Linux tinderbox, which should improve the machine's cycle time. The buildbot machines have taken over this job and their output is also better - so if you have any objection, please tell me soon or I'll take TUnit off that box.
• Preference Migration:
  More review and discussion about the advanced pref panel. It looks like the JVM switching stuff has only worked on Unix/Linux, but requires names of the paths that are not common any more, so it has been broken for a while on common systems (JVM devs probably knew better, but I'm not sure anyone else did). It seems like this feature should be extension fodder, and I'll get all the reviews for killing it.
  I also hope that other people are starting to work on the remaining pref panels left active in the old window, as we want to kill the old window finally for alpha.
• Windows Development Tools:
  I checked in Serge Gautherie's patch for enabling Windows source server support, if you want to try it, please do, and tell me if it works because I have no clue, being Linux-only on the development side of things.
• Version Control and SeaMonkey Development:
  As there has been talk of opening the mozilla-central repository on Mercurial (hg) and continuing trunk (1.9.1.x) development there, leaving cvs HEAD for the stable 1.9.0.x series once FF3 is out, it's time for SeaMonkey and Thunderbird to think about how to host development code in the future.
  We want want to base our next releases on 1.9.1.x for various reasons, so we need to figure out how to place our code in separate hg repositories and pull those together into a tree we can build. We probably all knew this point in time will come, though I guess many of us hoped to concentrate on Thunderbird 3 and SeaMonkey 2 before figuring this out.
  Figuring out where to place code affects everything not in mozilla-central today, including most suite-specific, shared mailnews and included extensions code, with at least the notable exception of Composer stuff that somehow got imported into mozilla-central. This might not be trivial, given that we might want to share a repository with e.g. Thunderbird, and given that even our own code is spread across multiple top-level directories at the moment. I'd like to figure that out at least in a testing setup, but any help is appreciated.
• SeaMonkey Status Meetings:
  I'd like to get the SeaMonkey together in some kind of status update regularly, ideally in a weekly manner, so that all of us know better what's progressing and what needs to be done. This could be via a phone meeting, an IRC meeting, or even just updating a wiki status page to be ready by some deadline (a wiki summary should be done for the other meeting types as well).
  If you want to participate and have some preferences for the type and timing of such status updates, please let me know.
• Various Discussions:
  Session (re)store, Thunderbird/mailnews development, 1.9.0 vs. 1.9.1, L10n and hg, Firefox Plus Summit, etc.

I finally got my invitation for the "Firefox Plus" Summit this summer without losing it via the Junk mail mechanism (my Bayes filter seems to be trained to consider it as spam), and I registered successfully, so I'm pretty sure now I'll attend this come together. As a project coordinator, I probably have several different interests there, I hope I don't need to weigh build&release, mailnews, and other talks too heavily against each other, but it's possible that I'll have to in some way. If you have any topic you want to talk to me about, please tell me, I'll be there and try to communicate with as many people as possible.
That said, my main focus (even on an event with the Firefox brand) is of course SeaMonkey, and I'll try to make as many talks/topics as possible that help our project and can bring us forward in some way.