Weekly Status Report, W07/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 07/2009 (February 09 - 15, 2009):

• Build System:
  Due to some recent changes, we had broken extension langpack packaging in two ways, I fixed one of those cases and also checked in the other one.
• Release Management:
  As SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 3 is nearing and we are in a freeze for that pre-release now, I looked into a number of requests for approval of patches to still land for this milestone, granting all of them so far, as they were good fixups and things we want to get tested on this alpha. We're now down to a state where I don't think there's much, if anything, left to still land at this stage. I also looked at our buildbot configurations somewhat but I'm not sure yet if I feel confident enough that I can get buildbot release automation to fully run this week, so I might once again go with the set of scripts I used for Alpha 2, esp. as we still can't ship L10n builds this time (see below).
• Misc Development:
  As the old fishcam is dead, I switched our Crtl+Alt+F easter egg to the new fishcam site operated by Lou Montulli, the inventor of Netscape's original "Amazing Fish Cam". Thanks Lou!
  I also investigated a session restore leak that we found to be fixed by a cleanup patch I later landed for Misak.
• German L10n:
  Once again I brought German SeaMonkey up to sync with trunk, and I also fixed an accesskey problem in the add-ons window.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, (un)forking of mailnews files, KompoZer and Composer, FOSDEM aftermath, toolbar/menubar customization, 3rd-party requirement for commit access, etc.

As we're wrapping up SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 3, it's time to take a look at what larger things made it into that release that should be tested - and which still didn't.
Early in this alpha cycle we could land places history, including storage of way more history entries with good performance and the new smart location bar autocomplete algorithm, which is said to be "awesome" for a number of people. We also could switch to the new login manager instead of the old "wallet" for password management, which shouldn't be much visible for user other than that we have reduced the number of modal dialogs and being able to remember password-only logins. A feature that probably will be appreciated by many users is toolbar customization, which now fully works for the browser component, extending it to at least mailnews, maybe more, is planned for the near future. The last large feature to go into Alpha 3 was session restore, enabling users to get back your windows and tabs after crashes and restarts of SeaMonkey.
The new download manager unfortunately couldn't make it yet, some work to switch the backend is still missing. Unfortunately, that also means that localized builds are still broken, but we'll ship experimental language packs once again for Alpha 3. Feed preview and tabbed mail both still need more work and are also still missing from this milestone, same for Mac theme improvements and full adaptation of Modern to SeaMonkey 2 - for the latter, we're still looking for someone who understands both our review process and theme CSS work to drive the existing work for it into the tree. We'd also appreciate if someone could help with OpenSearch support or else that one will not make SeaMonkey 2.

All in all, there are enough large changes along with the usual list of smaller changes and fixes that SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 3 should be interesting to test, but the list of things to work on is still significant. There's still some work to do on larger features, and of course a good number of cleanup tasks for the beta and final phase of this major release cycle, but it looks more and more manageable and I trust we're on the right way to an exciting SeaMonkey 2 release.

The future begins in summer 2009!