Weekly Status Report, W22/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 22/2009 (May 25 - 31, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build Machines:
  Some more work on the new buildbots, enabling static builds for nightlies but not normal builders. This reduced download size between 3% and 10% depending on platform, I would be glad if someone could do some performance testing on nightlies from the new and old buildbots to get numbers on static vs. shared builds in that regard as well.
  PalmSync will be removed from the comm-central tree soon and doesn't work with static builds, so I removed it from the new buildbot config right away.
  I also cared that the work for uploading packaged tests done by Serge was enabled on the new buildbots - this now enables anyone to run our test suites, even without having a full build system installed.
  The patch for L10 repack factory abstraction was updated for some bitrot, but not changed significantly. While I fixed that bitrot, I found some trailing whitespace and decided to fix whitespace in all of factory.py while I was there.
  When I investigated package file changes for static builds, I realized the the new CCMercurialBuildFactory doesn't call package-compare and wrote a patch for it.
  And after updating our new config for running compare-locales, the L10n build cycles now do that additional check and might even try "L10n merging", i.e. trying to produce working builds even when the localization isn't complete by merging in en-US strings - but I have not proven this to work for SeaMonkey in any way yet.
• Static Nightly Builds:
  As said above, I enabled static nightlies on the new buildbot configuration, and therefore looked into open issues we still have with making this the official configuration. Therefore, I made a patch for missing icons on Windows and finally even did a large fixup for package files and the removed-files list so that those are easier to manage in the future and so that static builds ship the right files without too much noise (and remove shared libs when a shared build is upgraded to a static one).
• Download Manager:
  The really big story of this week is the download manager landing.
  My work on the new tree-based download manager UI and download progress window rewrite as well as a prefs followup could land right away with the main work for switching from the xpfe to the toolkit backend.
  As followups, I filed and landed patches for making an ifndef really work and fixing a Mac-only test, both oversights by Callek or me from earlier patches.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Finally, the Build SeaMonkey locales from Mercurial bug could be marked FIXED, as with the download manager landing, we finally have all strings in the appropriate locales/ directories and picked up correctly by the "source L10n" build/(re)package mechanisms, so that localized SeaMonkey builds should be fully working (as long as dashboard is green for the used locale and the strings don't have syntax errors).
• German L10n:
  New strings for download manager and mail archiving UI landed, de was the first locale to be green after the download manager landing.
• Various Discussions:
  Mail archiving UI for SeaMonkey, 1.8 branch landings and 1.1.17 planning, tracking OSX buildbot failures down to a "hardware" (Parallels) issue, waiting for Parallels fix, Qt build bustages, comm-central commit access, sr policy, etc.

We're seeing some small followup issues with download manager, but general feedback is quite good so far. We are definitely coming into beta state now, and current SeaMonkey 2 nightlies are in some ways more mature than stable 1.1.x releases. Tabbed mail is going through the review process and with the current patch, Lightning is usable. The future looks bright.
Well, it would look brighter if we had some schedules for beta or final. As we need to build stable milestones and releases upon a stable mailnews backend, we need to closely coordinate with Thunderbird, and that team has been pushing out their upcoming beta further and further while waiting on their feature of vastly improved search to land. That also has been pushing out our SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release. And with them adding a further beta, it now looks very clear to us that we will add a SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 after this one as well. We unfortunately still need to wait for the clouds over the Thunderbird schedules to lift before we can come up with schedules for those milestones and releases on our side, but we count on being close to their betas and final in terms of dates.
Depending on the speed of the review process, tabbed mail will either make Beta 1 or be pushed to Beta 2, I hope we can take a few more of the Thunderbird 3 improvements in Beta 2. The current code is quite ready for Beta 1 right now, so it can only get better.
Oh, and we now know for sure that we will have fully localized builds for all major platforms right with the Beta 1 release - for the first time ever in suite history!